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arXiv:1809.08852 · Physical Review Letters

Optical Transmission of an Atomic Vapor in the Mesoscopic Regime

T. Peyrot, Yvan R. P. Sortais, Jean‐Jacques Greffet, Antoine Browaeys, Armen D. Sargsyan, James Keaveney, Ifan G. Hughes, Charles S. Adams

Published Mar 20, 2019• 32 citations
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Abstract

By measuring the transmission of near-resonant light through an atomic vapor confined in a nanocell we demonstrate a mesoscopic optical response arising from the nonlocality induced by the motion of atoms with a phase coherence length larger than the cell thickness. Whereas conventional dispersion theory-where the local atomic response is simply convolved by the Maxwell-Boltzmann velocity distribution-is unable to reproduce the measured spectra, a model including a nonlocal, size-dependent susceptibility is found to be in excellent agreement with the measurements. This result improves our understanding of light-matter interaction in the mesoscopic regime and has implications for applications where mesoscopic effects may degrade or enhance the performance of miniaturized atomic sensors.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.122.113401

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By measuring the transmission of near-resonant light through an atomic vapor confined in a nanocell we demonstrate a mesoscopic optical response arising from the nonlocality induced by the motion of atoms with a phase coherence length larger than the cell thickness. Whereas conventional dispersion theory-where the local atomic response is simply convolved by the Maxwell-Boltzmann velocity distribution-is unable to reproduce the measured spectra, a model including a nonlocal, size-dependent susceptibility is found to be in excellent agreement with the measurements. This result improves our understanding of light-matter interaction in the mesoscopic regime and has implications for applications where mesoscopic effects may degrade or enhance the performance of miniaturized atomic sensors.
We measure the near-resonant transmission of light through a dense medium of potassium vapor confined in a cell with nanometer thickness in order to investigate the origin and validity of the collective Lamb shift. A complete model including the multiple reflections in the nanocell reproduces accurately the observed line shape. It allows the extraction of a density-dependent shift and width of the bulk atomic medium resonance, deconvolved from the cavity effect. We observe an additional, unexpected dependence of the shift with the thickness of the medium. This extra dependence demands further experimental and theoretical investigations.
Alkali vapors confined in nano-scale cells are promising tools for future integrated atom-based sensor. In this thesis, we investigate the interaction between light and an ensemble of atoms confined in a nano-geometry. We focus on the different processes that can modify the optical response of the atomic ensemble and possibly affect the sensitivity of a sensor based on that technology. First, we study the non-local response of atoms to a light excitation due the atomic motion in thermal vapors. When the distance over which the atoms relaxes is larger than the size of the cell, the optical response depends on the size of the system. We have observed that for transmission spectroscopy, this leads to a periodic modification of the optical response with a period equal to the wavelength of the optical transition. Subsequently we showed that when the density of atom increases, the atomic response becomes local again. In this dense regime, the resonant dipole-dipole interaction in a sub-wavelength geometry leads to collective frequency shifts of the spectral lines. We demonstrate that these shifts were induced by the cavity formed by the cell walls, hence clarifying a long-standing issue. We developed a model to extract the density shifts deconvolved from the cavity effects. Close to a surface, the optical response is also affected by the van der Waals atom-surface interaction. We introduced a new method to extract precisely the strength of this interaction. We also developed a new generation of super-polished glass nano-cells and we presented promising spectroscopic signals. Finally, using these cells, we have compared transmission and off-axis spectroscopic techniques.
When many light emitters are subjected to an electromagnetic field with a wavelength λ, they may react collectively to the field. The resonant resulting, light-induced dipole-dipole interactions between atoms should lead to a collective frequency shift of the atomic lines. This shift, unfortunately named the cooperative or collective Lamb shift (CLS) despite its classical nature, depends on the shape of the sample. I will present a new investigation of the origin and validity of the CLS. To do so, we have measured the transmission resonance line shape of a dense hot vapor of potassium atoms confined in a slab with nanometer thickness. Using a complete model, we extract a density-dependent shift and width of the bulk atomic medium resonance (See Fig. 1(a)), deconvolved from the cavity effect [1].
Light propagation in disordered media is a fundamental and important problem in optics and photonics. In particular, engineering light-matter interaction in disordered cold atomic ensembles is one of the central topics in modern quantum and atomic optics. The collective response of dense atomic gases under light excitation, which crucially depends on the spatial distribution of atoms and the geometry of the ensemble, has important impacts on quantum technologies like quantum sensors, atomic clocks and quantum information storage. Here we analyze near-resonant light transmission in two-dimensional dense ultracold atomic ensembles with short-range positional correlations. Based on the coupled-dipole simulations under different atom number densities and correlation lengths, we show that the collective effects are strongly influenced by those positional correlations, manifested as significant shifts and broadening or narrowing of transmission resonance lines. We also analyze the eigenstate distribution of different atomic ensembles. This work may provide profound implications on collective and cooperative effects in cold atomic ensembles as well as the study of mesoscopic physics concerning light transport in strongly scattering disorder media.
Since the recent realization of extremely thin vapour cells (local thickness: 20-1000 nm), we investigate the optical properties of these 1-D confined vapours. Aside from their interest for Doppler-free spectroscopy, nanocells offer a new tool to evaluate collisional shift and broadening, yielding an access to the open problem of collisions under confinement. It also allows probing of the atom-surface interaction in a range of unusual short distances. The experimental exploration of the distance dependence, normally evolving according to the z −3 van der Waals (vW) dependence ( z : the atom-surface distance), is worth doing because it could be affected by imperfections of the real surface, such as roughness, adsorbed impurities or charges. A detailed lineshape analysis is now under progress, with tight constraints imposed to the fitting by the twin information brought by simultaneous reflection and transmission spectra. Another issue is a possible resonant enhancement, susceptible to induce a repulsive vW, due to the coupling between atom excitation and a surface mode.
Traditionally, measuring the center-of-mass (c.m.) velocity of an atomic ensemble relies on measuring the Doppler shift of the absorption spectrum of single atoms in the ensemble. Mapping out the velocity distribution of the ensemble is indispensable when determining the c.m. velocity using this technique. As a result, highly sensitive measurements require preparation of an ensemble with a narrow Doppler width. Here, we use a dispersive measurement of light passing through a moving room temperature atomic vapor cell to determine the velocity of the cell in a single shot with a short-term sensitivity of 5.5 μm s^{-1} Hz^{-1/2}. The dispersion of the medium is enhanced by creating quantum interference through an auxiliary transition for the probe light under electromagnetically induced transparency condition. In contrast to measurement of single atoms, this method is based on the collective motion of atoms and can sense the c.m. velocity of an ensemble without knowing its velocity distribution. Our results improve the previous measurements by 3 orders of magnitude and can be used to design a compact motional sensor based on thermal atoms.