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arXiv:1606.08206 · Physical Review A

Optical pumping effect in absorption imaging of F=1 atomic gases

Sooshin Kim, Sang Won Seo, Heung‐Ryoul Noh, Yong-il Shin

Published Aug 22, 2016• 5 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We report our study of the optical pumping effect in absorption imaging of $^{23}\mathrm{Na}$ atoms in the $F=1$ hyperfine spin states. Solving a set of rate equations for the spin populations in the presence of a probe beam, we obtain an analytic expression for the optical signal of the $F=1$ absorption imaging. Furthermore, we verify the result by measuring the absorption spectra of $^{23}\mathrm{Na}$ Bose-Einstein condensates prepared in various spin states with different probe-beam pulse durations. The analytic result can be used in the quantitative analysis of $F=1$ spinor condensate imaging and readily applied to other alkali-metal atoms with $I=3/2$ nuclear spin such as $^{87}\mathrm{Rb}$.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.94.023625

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Rate equations for the optical pumping of alkali-metal vapors simultaneously subject to pumping, relaxation in the excited state, and relaxation in the ground state are shown to yield analytic solutions for the alkali-metal electronic and nuclear-spin polarizations in the limit of weak pumping. Nuclear-spin and hyperfine-interaction effects are properly included. Analysis of the double-exponential form of the pumping transient of the ground-state electronic-spin polarization is shown to yield new methods for the measurement of cross sections for collisional relaxation in both the ground and excited states. Formulas are derived that relate relaxation cross sections to experimentally measurable parameters. Formulas describing the influence of nuclear spin on signals obtained from standard depolarization of resonance-radiation experiments also are provided. Ambiguities in earlier optical-pumping experiments and calculations arising from oversimplified descriptions of relaxation processes are discussed.
The creation and detection of atomic polarization is examined theoretically through the study of basic optical-pumping mechanisms and absorption and fluorescence measurements and the dependence of these processes on the size of ground- and excited-state hyperfine splittings is determined. The consequences of this dependence are studied in more detail for the case of nonlinear magneto-optical rotation in the Faraday geometry (an effect requiring the creation and detection of rank-two polarization in the ground state) with alkali-metal atoms. Analytic formulas for the optical rotation signal under various experimental conditions are presented.
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