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arXiv:1709.05913 · Physical Review A

Interference between two resonant transitions with distinct initial and final states connected by radiative decay

A. Marsman, Marko Horbatsch, Eric A. Hessels

Published Dec 11, 2017• 10 citations
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Abstract

It is demonstrated that the spectroscopy of a resonant transition can be altered by a nonvanishing population of the system in states away from the transition, so long as those states can radiatively decay into the states involved in the resonant transition. This finding identifies a systematic effect that can be important to precision measurements.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.96.062111

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It is demonstrated that the spectroscopy of a resonant transition can be altered by a nonvanishing population of the system in states away from the transition, so long as those states can radiatively decay into the states involved in the resonant transition. This finding identifies a systematic effect that can be important to precision measurements.
Abstract Supersonic beams of hydrogen atoms, prepared selectively in Rydberg–Stark states of principal quantum number n in the range between 25 and 35, have been deflected by 90 ◦ , decelerated and loaded into off-axis electric traps at initial densities of ≈ 10 6 atoms cm −3 and translational temperatures of 150 mK. The ability to confine the atoms spatially was exploited to study their decay by radiative and collisional processes. The evolution of the population of trapped atoms was measured for several milliseconds in dependence of the principal quantum number of the initially prepared states, the initial Rydberg-atom density in the trap, and the temperature of the environment of the trap, which could be varied between 7.5 and 300 K using a cryorefrigerator. At room temperature, the population of trapped Rydberg atoms was found to decay faster than expected on the basis of their natural lifetimes, primarily because of absorption and emission stimulated by the thermal radiation field. At the lowest temperatures investigated experimentally, the decay was found to be multiexponential, with an initial rate scaling as n − 4 and corresponding closely to the natural lifetimes of the initially prepared Rydberg–Stark states. The decay rate was found to continually decrease over time and to reach an almost n -independent rate of more than (1 ms) −1 after 3 ms. To analyze the experimentally observed decay of the populations of trapped atoms, numerical simulations were performed which included all radiative processes, i.e., spontaneous emission as well as absorption and emission stimulated by the thermal radiation. These simulations, however, systematically underestimated the population of trapped atoms observed after several milliseconds by almost two orders of magnitude, although they reliably predicted the decay rates of the remaining atoms in the trap. The calculations revealed that the atoms that remain in the trap for the longest times have larger absolute values of the magnetic quantum number m than the optically prepared Rydberg–Stark states, and this observation led to the conclusion that a much more efficient mechanism than a purely radiative one must exist to induce transitions to Rydberg–Stark states of higher ∣ m ∣ values. While searching for such a mechanism, we discovered that resonant dipole–dipole collisions between Rydberg atoms in the trap represent an extremely efficient way of inducing transitions to states of higher ∣ m ∣ values. The efficiency of the mechanism is a consequence of the almost perfectly linear nature of the Stark effect at the moderate field strengths used to trap the atoms, which permits cascades of transitions between entire networks of near-degenerate Rydberg-atom-pair states. To include such cascades of resonant dipole–dipole transitions in the numerical simulations, we have generalized the two-state Förster-type collision model used to describe resonant collisions in ultracold Rydberg gases to a multi-state situation. It is only when considering the combined effects of collisional and radiative processes that the observed decay of the population of Rydberg atoms in the trap could be satisfactorily reproduced for all n values studied experimentally.
Possibility of coherent control of spontaneous emission from four- and five-level systems in the laser radiation field is studied. The four-level system consists of two levels resonantly driven by laser radiation where either of levels may decay to a separate level. For such a system we show that the presence of the second decay channel may deteriorate the destructive interference occurring because of Autler-Townes effect in case of one decay channel. The five-level system represents two two-level resonantly driven systems with the upper levels decaying to a common level. For this case, the interference between the two decay channels is partially or completely destructive or constructive depending on the initial conditions and on the mutual orientation of the transition dipole moments. It is shown that population transfer takes place by the same quantum vacuum via spontaneous emission. The populations are shown to have damping oscillatory nature.