Suppression and echancement of spontaneous emission in molecular system

Wai Keung Lai, Stig Stenholm

Maciej Lewenstein, THOMAS W. MOSSBERG, Roy J. Glauber

Vyacheslav I. Yukalov

Einat Frishman, Moshe Shapiro

We present an experimentally viable approach for suppressing the spontaneous emission in several atomic and molecular systems. We have shown [E. Frishman and M. Shapiro, Phys. Rev. Lett. 87, 253001 (2001)] that a coherent excitation of overlapping resonances followed by the application of infrequent interruptions can result in complete suppression of spontaneous emission. In the present work, the overlapping resonances result from splitting a single resonance with an external (spectator) field. An optimized superposition of the two components is formed by a shaped pulse excitation from the ground state.

Geert L. J. A. Rikken

Xueping Long, Scarlett S. Yu, Andrew M. Jayich +1 more

Strong optical forces with minimal spontaneous emission are desired for molecular deceleration and atom interferometry applications. We report experimental benchmarking of such a stimulated optical force driven by ultrafast laser pulses. We apply this technique to accelerate atoms, demonstrating up to an average of 19ℏk momentum transfers per spontaneous emission event. This represents more than an order of magnitude improvement in suppression of spontaneous emission compared to radiative scattering forces. For molecular beam slowing, this technique is capable of delivering a many-fold increase in the achievable time-averaged force to significantly reduce both the slowing distance and detrimental losses to dark vibrational states.