I am working on building a nano-scopic interface that enables strong interactions between light and matter. For many years, researchers have hoped to generate, store, transport, and manipulate information in a quantum way, which opens up many possibilities in fundamental research and applications. One common scheme, among others, proposes that information is stored in neutral atoms coded by internal quantum states and is exchanged quickly and coherently via flying photons. In our lab, we bring cesium atoms very close (100 nm) to the nano-scale photonic crystal waveguides in a controlled way, under vacuum. Trapping the atoms there is challenging because at this tiny distance, atoms are attracted to the solid devices due to the van der Waals force. Nevertheless, this system has several exciting features. The strong confinement of the evanescent light field near the waveguide boosts the coupling strength between those atoms and photons, and the band structure engineering of the waveguide brings additional controls on the strength and nature of the interactions, such as the slow light effect and quenched guided light modes in band gap. We hope to achieve strong couplings between single atoms and single photons, and considerable fundamental work has been done in in Prof. H. J. Kimble’s quantum optics lab, in collaboration with Prof. O. Painter’s lab at Caltech.