Atomic spontaneous decay rate enhancement near a carbon nanotube Original Research Article

Spontaneous decay process of an excited two-level atom placed inside or outside a single-wall carbon nanotube is analyzed for both weak and strong atom-radiation-field coupling regime. In the weak coupling regime, the effect of the nanotube surface has been demonstrated to dramatically increase the spontaneous decay rate––by 4–5 orders of magnitude compared with that of the same atom in vacuum. Such an increase is associated with the nonradiative decay via surface quasiparticle excitations in the nanotube. In the strong coupling regime, the decay of the upper atomic state proceeds via damped Rabi oscillations with the frequency assigned by the density of final photonic states of the system.