Abstract
Dipole–dipole interactions, which govern phenomena such as cooperative Lamb shifts, superradiant decay rates, Van der Waals forces and resonance energy transfer rates, are conventionally limited to the Coulombic near-field. Here we reveal a class of real-photon and virtual-photon long-range quantum electrodynamic interactions that have a singularity in media with hyperbolic dispersion. The singularity in the dipole–dipole coupling, referred to as a super-Coulombic interaction, is a result of an effective interaction distance that goes to zero in the ideal limit irrespective of the physical distance. We investigate the entire landscape of atom–atom interactions in hyperbolic media confirming the giant long-range enhancement. We also propose multiple experimental platforms to verify our predicted effect with phonon–polaritonic hexagonal boron nitride, plasmonic super-lattices and hyperbolic meta-surfaces as well. Our work paves the way for the control of cold atoms above hyperbolic meta-surfaces and the study of many-body physics with hyperbolic media.
Highlights
Dipole–dipole interactions, which govern phenomena such as cooperative Lamb shifts, superradiant decay rates, Van der Waals forces and resonance energy transfer rates, are conventionally limited to the Coulombic near-field
The resultant singular long-range interaction, referred to as a super-Coulombic interaction, is described by an effective interaction distance that goes to zero along a material-dependent resonance angle. We show that this interaction affects the entire landscape of real photon and virtual photon phenomena such as the cooperative Lamb shift (CLS), the cooperative decay rate (CDR), resonance energy transfer rates and frequency shifts, as well as resonant interatomic forces
We provide a unified perspective for controlling DDIs on multiple experimental platforms for hyperbolic media including plasmonic superlattices, hyperbolic metasurfaces and natural hyperbolic media such as hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN)
Summary
Dipole–dipole interactions, which govern phenomena such as cooperative Lamb shifts, superradiant decay rates, Van der Waals forces and resonance energy transfer rates, are conventionally limited to the Coulombic near-field. The resultant singular long-range interaction, referred to as a super-Coulombic interaction, is described by an effective interaction distance that goes to zero (re-0) along a material-dependent resonance angle. We show that this interaction affects the entire landscape of real photon and virtual photon phenomena such as the cooperative Lamb shift (CLS), the cooperative decay rate (CDR), resonance energy transfer rates and frequency shifts, as well as resonant interatomic forces. We stress that the super-Coulombic effect engineers the conventional non-radiative (longitudinal) near-fields as opposed to radiative (transverse) modes and will occur over a broad range of frequencies due to the broadband nature of the hyperbolic dispersion relation[25,26,27,28]. Extraordinary waves satisfy the hyperbolic dispersion relation k2x=Ez þ k2z =Ex 1⁄4 o2=c2 when ExEzo[0]
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