Formation of supermodes in atom-microcavity chains

A chain of atom-microcavity systems coupled by a common fiber is considered. We analyze the formation of supermodes and focus on the dependence of this effect on the chain geometry and the number of atom-cavity subsystems. We show that the significance of supermodes to the transmission increases with the number of atom-cavity subsystems. We identify spectral ranges in which the chain geometry decides whether supermodes are formed, and ranges which are insensitive to the geometry. Furthermore, we show that the reflection signal allows to identify which cavities couple to atoms, which is a crucial information in experimental realizations of longer atom-cavity chain systems.