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arXiv:1709.04529 · Physical Review A

Mirror-assisted coherent backscattering from the Mollow sidebands

N. Piovella, R Teixeira, Robin Kaiser, Ph. W. Courteille, Romain Bachelard

Published Nov 27, 2017• 2 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

In front of a mirror, the radiation of weakly driven large disordered clouds presents an interference fringe in the backward direction, on top of an incoherent background. Although strongly driven atoms usually present little coherent scattering, we show here that the mirror-assisted version can produce high contrast fringes, for arbitrarily high saturation parameters. The contrast of the fringes oscillates with the Rabi frequency of the atomic transition and the distance between the mirror and the atoms, due to the coherent interference between the carrier and the Mollow sidebands of the saturated resonant fluorescence spectrum emitted by the atoms. The setup thus represents a powerful platform to study the spectral properties of ensembles of correlated scatterers.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.96.053852

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In front of a mirror, the radiation of weakly driven large disordered clouds presents an interference fringe in the backward direction, on top of an incoherent background. Although strongly driven atoms usually present little coherent scattering, we show here that the mirror-assisted version can produce high contrast fringes, for arbitrarily high saturation parameters. The contrast of the fringes oscillates with the Rabi frequency of the atomic transition and the distance between the mirror and the atoms, due to the coherent interference between the carrier and the Mollow sidebands of the saturated resonant fluorescence spectrum emitted by the atoms. The setup thus represents a powerful platform to study the spectral properties of ensembles of correlated scatterers.
We present a method to obtain the first-order temporal correlation function, ${g}^{(1)}(\ensuremath{\tau})$, of the light scattered by an assembly of pointlike quantum scatterers, or equivalently its spectral power distribution. This method is based on the mirror-assisted backscattering interferometric setup. The contrast of its angular fringes was already linked to the convolution of ${g}^{(1)}(\ensuremath{\tau})$ for different Rabi frequencies taking into account the incoming spatial intensity profile of the probe beam, but we show here that by simply adding a half wave plate to the interferometer in a specific configuration, the fringe contrast becomes ${g}^{(1)}(\ensuremath{\tau})$ of the light scattered by atoms, which are now all subjected to the same laser intensity. This method has direct application to obtaining the saturated spectrum of quantum systems. We discuss some nontrivial aspects of this interferometric setup and propose an analogy with a double Mach-Zehnder interferometer.
Coherent backscattering is a coherence effect in the propagation of waves through disordered media involving two or more scattering events. Here we report on the observation of coherent backscattering from individual atoms and their mirror images. This system displays two important advantages: First, the effect can be observed at low optical densities, which allows us to work in very dilute clouds or far from resonance. Second, due to the fact that the radiation of an atom interferes constructively with that of its own image, the phenomenon is much more robust to dephasing induced by strong saturation. In particular, the contribution of inelastically scattered photons to the interference process is demonstrated.
We investigate cooperative fluorescence in a dilute cloud of strongly driven two-level emitters. Starting from the Heisenberg equations of motion, we compute the first-order scattering corrections to the saturation of the excited-state population and to the resonance-fluorescence spectrum, which both require going beyond the state-of-the-art linear-optics approach to describe collective phenomena. A dipole blockade is observed due to long-range dipole-dipole coupling that vanishes at stronger driving fields. Furthermore, we compute the inelastic component of the light scattered by a cloud of many atoms and find that the Mollow triplet is affected by cooperativity. In a lobe around the forward direction, the inelastic Mollow triplet develops a spectral asymmetry, observable under experimental conditions.
In this theoretical paper, we investigate coherence properties of the near-resonant light scattered by two atoms exposed to a strong monochromatic field. To properly incorporate saturation effects, we use a quantum Langevin approach. In contrast to the standard optical Bloch equations, this method naturally provides the inelastic spectrum of the radiated light induced by the quantum electromagnetic vacuum fluctuations. However, to get the right spectral properties of the scattered light, it is essential to correctly describe the statistical properties of these vacuum fluctuations. Because of the presence of the two atoms, these statistical properties are not Gaussian: (i) the spatial two-points correlation function displays a specklelike behavior and (ii) the three-points correlation function does not vanish. We also explain how to incorporate in a simple way propagation with a frequency-dependent scattering mean-free path, meaning that the two atoms are embedded in an average scattering dispersive medium. Finally we show that saturation-induced nonlinearities strongly modify the atomic scattering properties and, as a consequence, provide a source of decoherence in multiple scattering. This is exemplified by considering the coherent backscattering configuration where interference effects are blurred by this decoherence mechanism. This leads to a decrease of the so-called coherent backscattering enhancement factor.
Scattering of classical light by atomic clouds induces photon-mediated effective long-range interactions between the atoms and leads to cooperative effects even at low atomic densities. We introduce a simulation technique that allows us to investigate the quantum regime of the dynamics of large clouds of atoms. We show that the fluorescence spectrum of the cloud can be used to probe genuine quantum cooperative effects. Signatures of these effects are the occurrence, and the scaling behavior, of additional sidebands at twice the frequency of the classical Mollow sidebands, as well as an asymmetry of the Mollow triplet.
The second-order correlation function for light emitted from a strongly and near-resonantly driven dilute cloud of atoms is discussed. Because of the strong driving, the fluorescence spectrum separates into distinct peaks, for which the spectral properties can be defined individually. It is shown that the second-order correlations for various combinations of photons from different spectral lines exhibit bunching together with super-Poissonian or sub-Poissonian photon statistics, tunable by the choice of the detector positions. Additionally, a Cauchy-Schwarz inequality is violated for photons emitted from particular spectral bands. The emitted light intensity is proportional to the square of the number of particles, and thus can potentially be intense. Three different averaging procedures to model ensemble disorder are compared.