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Quantum Electronics and Laser Science Conference

Hole burning by momentum redistribution of atoms via spontaneous emission

Hong Yuan Ling

Published Jan 20, 2003• 0 citations

Abstract

Summary form only given. Recent advances in laser cooling and trapping have led to a growing interest in laser spectroscopy in cold atomic samples. Examples include the work of Guo et al. and Courtois et al. about the recoil-induced resonance, and Bonifacio et al. and Moore et al. about the collective-atomic-recoil lasers (CARL). At the heart of these applications is the atomic recoil by photon absorption and emission. In the work, we explore a recoil-related phenomenon: hole burning resulting from the momentum redistribution of atoms by spontaneous emission, and its possible application in the precision spectroscopy. In the traditional saturation spectroscopy, the hole in the Doppler profile is created by laser excitation of atoms from the ground to the excited level. By contrast, the hole, is produced by removing the atoms in the velocity group, where the hole is burned, into the neighboring velocity groups of the same ground level. This process is accomplished through optical pumping and momentum redistribution by spontaneous emission. As a result, the requirement on the intensities of the driving laser fields is low, limited only by the interaction time. This is in contrast to the traditional saturation spectroscopy where the driving laser intensity has to be comparable to the saturation intensity determined by the decay rate of the excited level.

DOI: 10.1109/qels.1999.807326

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Summary form only given. Recent advances in laser cooling and trapping have led to a growing interest in laser spectroscopy in cold atomic samples. Examples include the work of Guo et al. and Courtois et al. about the recoil-induced resonance, and Bonifacio et al. and Moore et al. about the collective-atomic-recoil lasers (CARL). At the heart of these applications is the atomic recoil by photon absorption and emission. In the work, we explore a recoil-related phenomenon: hole burning resulting from the momentum redistribution of atoms by spontaneous emission, and its possible application in the precision spectroscopy. In the traditional saturation spectroscopy, the hole in the Doppler profile is created by laser excitation of atoms from the ground to the excited level. By contrast, the hole, is produced by removing the atoms in the velocity group, where the hole is burned, into the neighboring velocity groups of the same ground level. This process is accomplished through optical pumping and momentum redistribution by spontaneous emission. As a result, the requirement on the intensities of the driving laser fields is low, limited only by the interaction time. This is in contrast to the traditional saturation spectroscopy where the driving laser intensity has to be comparable to the saturation intensity determined by the decay rate of the excited level.

We present a theoretical study of the interaction between light and a cold gasof three-level, ladder conﬁguration atoms close to two-photon resonance. In particular, weinvestigate the existence of collective atomic recoil lasing (CARL) instabilities in differentregimes of internal atomic excitation and compare to previous studies of the CARL instabilityinvolving two-level atoms. In the case of two-level atoms, the CARL instability is quenchedat high pump rates with signiﬁcant atomic excitation by saturation of the (one-photon)coherence, which produces the optical forces responsible for the instability and rapid heatingdue to high spontaneous emission rates. We show that in the two-photon CARL schemestudied here involving three-level atoms, CARL instabilities can survive at high pump rateswhen the atoms have signiﬁcant excitation, due to the contributions to the optical forces frommultiple coherences and the reduction of spontaneous emission due to transitions betweenthe populated states being dipole forbidden. This two-photon CARL scheme may form thebasis of methods to increase the effective nonlinear optical response of cold atomic gases.

It is shown that, as a result of the atomic recoil associated with the absorption and emission of radiation, resonances can appear in nonlinear spectroscopy. The theory is illustrated by calculating the line shapes associated with nearly degenerate four-wave mixing and pump-probe spectroscopy when laser fields interact with an ensemble of two-level atoms. The recoil-induced resonances should be observable for atoms cooled below the Doppler limit of laser cooling, and the line shapes may provide a means for measuring the velocity distribution of these cooled atoms.

We study the dynamics of laser-cooled two-level atoms in a time-dependent standing wave. In the absence of spontaneous emission, our model reduces to the much studied quantum standard mapping. For a sample of atoms initially cooled to the Doppler limit, the momentum variance increases linearly with interaction time. A sample of atoms initially cooled to the recoil limit will display momentum diffusion at a rate that is determined by two numbers: the classical chaos parameter and a dimensionless Planck parameter. This diffusion ceases after the quantum-mechanical break time. Spontaneous emission will modify the diffusion rate of both Doppler- and recoil-cooled atoms. We show that one component of the new diffusion constant is due to spontaneous recoil and that there is a correction to the deterministic diffusion rate due to the destruction of correlations in the stroboscopic position. Spontaneous emission will destroy the dynamic localization of atoms cooled to the recoil limit. The new momentum diffusion constant can be related to the quasistationary state-decoherence rate. \textcopyright{} 1996 The American Physical Society.

This Letter reports the demonstration of laser cooling without spontaneous emission, and thereby addresses a significant controversy. It works by restricting the atom-light interaction to a time short compared to a cycle of absorption followed by natural decay. It is achieved by using the bichromatic force on an atomic transition with a relatively long excited state lifetime and a relatively short cooling time so that spontaneous emission effects are minimized. The observed width of the one-dimensional velocity distribution is reduced by ×2 thereby reducing the "temperature" by ×4. Moreover, our results comprise a compression in phase space because the spatial expansion of the atomic sample is limited. This accomplishment is of interest to direct laser cooling of molecules or in experiments where working space or time is limited.

The atomic-recoil effect leads to large (25%) asymmetries in a nearly ideal form of saturation spectroscopy based on Ca atoms that have been laser-cooled to . Starting with spectra from the more familiar Doppler-broadened domain, we show how the fundamental asymmetry between absorption and stimulated emission of light manifests itself when shorter spectroscopic pulses lead to the Fourier transform regime. These effects occur on frequency scales much larger than the size of the recoil shift itself, and have not been described before in saturation spectroscopy. These results directly impact precision spectroscopic measurements.