Diffusion-induced Ramsey narrowing that appears when atoms can leave the interaction region and repeatedly return without lost of coherence is investigated using strong collisions approximation. The effective diffusion equation is obtained and solved for low-dimensional model configurations and three-dimensional real one.
We propose a diffusion model for the recently discovered diffusion-induced Ramsey narrowing arising when atoms diffuse in a buffer-gas cell in the laser radiation field. The diffusion equation for the coherence of metastable states coupled with an excited state by laser radiation of different frequencies in a three-level scheme of the atom-field interaction is obtained in the strong-collision approximation. The dependence of the shape of an absorption line near the transmission maximum of one of the frequencies on the two-photon resonance detuning for various geometries of the cell is investigated.
In a recent paper [Y. Xiao et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 96, 043601 (2006)] we characterized diffusion-induced Ramsey narrowing as a general phenomenon, in which diffusion of coherence in-and-out of an interaction region such as a laser beam induces spectral narrowing of the associated resonance lineshape. Here we provide a detailed presentation of the repeated interaction model of diffusion-induced Ramsey narrowing, with particular focus on its application to Electromagnetically Induced Transparency (EIT) of atomic vapor in a buffer gas cell. We compare this model both to experimental data and numerical calculations.
We investigated effects of spatially separated laser fields on amplitudes and widths of electromagnetically induced transparency in M-type atomic system.We have shown narrowing of the electromagnetically induced transmission resonance and therefore enhancement of medium non-linearities that can be explained by diffusion-induced Ramsey narrowing.Depending on the polarization of two laser beams, narrow probe Hanle transmission resonance changes its sign in respect of the profile obtained when the pump laser beam is off.
The effect of wall-induced Ramsey interference on the electromagnetically induced absorption (EIA) in an anti-relaxation coated vapor cell is studied in a four-level closed N-type atomic system. We show that the atomic coherence spontaneously transferred from the excited states to the ground states may interfere via the Ramsey sequence of the moving atoms with decoherence-free wall collisions. The spectral narrowing of the EIA resonance lineshape is induced by the Ramsey effect because of the long lifetime of the spontaneously transferred atomic coherence between the ground states. This calculated Ramsey EIA spectrum is in good agreement with the narrow EIA spectrum obtained experimentally in the anti-relaxation coated vapor cell.
We present a theoretical model for electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) in vapor that incorporates atomic motion and velocity-changing collisions into the dynamics of the density-matrix distribution. Within a unified formalism, we demonstrate various motional effects, known for EIT in vapor: Doppler broadening of the absorption spectrum; Dicke narrowing and time-of-flight broadening of the transmission window for a finite-sized probe; diffusion of atomic coherence during storage of light and diffusion of the light-matter excitation during slow-light propagation; and Ramsey narrowing of the spectrum for a probe and pump beams of finite size.