  A promising approach to merge atomic systems with scalable photonics has
emerged recently, which consists of trapping cold atoms near tapered
nanofibers. Here, we describe a novel technique to achieve strong, coherent
coupling between a single atom and photon in such a system. Our approach makes
use of collective enhancement effects, which allow a lattice of atoms to form a
high-finesse cavity within the fiber. We show that a specially designated
"impurity" atom within the cavity can experience strongly enhanced interactions
with single photons in the fiber. Under realistic conditions, a "strong
coupling" regime can be reached, wherein it becomes feasible to observe vacuum
Rabi oscillations between the excited impurity atom and a single cavity
quantum. This technique can form the basis for a scalable quantum information
network using atom-nanofiber systems.
