Suppression of spontaneous emission and superradiance over macroscopic distances in media with negative refraction -: art. no. 011804

The possibility of negative optical path length in left-handed media (LHM) is shown to lead to complete suppression of spontaneous emission of an atom in front of a mirror with a layer of LHM. For the same reason two atoms put at the foci of a perfect lens formed by a parallel LHM slab [J. B. Pendry, Phys. Rev. Lett. 85, 3966 (2000)] exhibit perfect subradiance and superradiance. It is shown that these effects occur over distances that can be orders of magnitude larger than the transition wavelength and are only limited by the propagation length within the free-space decay time of the atoms. Single- and two-atom decay rates are calculated from the, Greens function of the electric field in the presence of a LHM and limitations as well as potential applications are discussed.