  We discuss the prospects for enhancing absorption and scattering of light
from a weakly coupled atom in a high-finesse optical cavity by adding a medium
with large, positive group index of refraction. The slow-light effect is known
to narrow the cavity transmission spectrum and increase the photon lifetime,
but the quality factor of the cavity may not be increased in a metrologically
useful sense. Specifically, detection of the weakly coupled atom through either
cavity ringdown measurements or the Purcell effect fails to improve with the
addition of material slow light. A single-atom model of the dispersive medium
helps elucidate why this is the case.
