Dipole de-excitation near orthogonal conductor surfaces

A dipole active emitter radiating, not in free space, but within a homogeneous dielectric near the intersection line of two orthogonal planar conductors bounding the dielectric displays novel emission characteristics. This situation is shown here to give rise to superradiance and subradiance phenomena that are highly sensitive to the dipole orientation (controllable optically), and to the proximity of the emitter to the intersection line. The theory is developed using non-relativistic quantum electrodynamics where the fields are second quantised in terms of modes satisfying the electromagnetic boundary conditions at the conductor surfaces and the interaction Hamiltonian between the emitter and the quantised fields is the familiar form Hint = −μ · D/ε0, where μ is the dipole moment vector and D is the quantised electric displacement field. The variations of the emission rate with position are displayed for different dipole orientations and the implications of the results for the possibility of using this physical environment for the realisation of scalable architectures for quantum information processing are pointed out.