Controlling resonant photonic transport along optical waveguides by two-level atoms

Recent works [Shen et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 95, 213001 (2005); Zhou et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 101, 100501 (2008)] showed that the incident photons cannot transmit along an optical waveguide containing a resonant two-level atom (TLA). Here we propose an approach to overcome such a difficulty by using asymmetric couplings between the photons and a TLA. Our numerical results show that the transmission spectrum of the photon depends on both the frequency of the incident photons and the photon-TLA couplings. Consequently, this system can serve as a controllable photon attenuator, by which the transmission probability of the resonantly incident photons can be changed from 0% to 100%. A possible application to explain the recent experimental observations [Astafiev et al., Science 327, 840 (2010)] is also discussed.