An analysis is made of the scattering and absorption of light by a hydrogenlike atom in the field of an electromagnetic wave which mixes resonantly an excited level (n = 2) with its neighbor (n = 3). The scattering and absorption cross sections are calculated as a function of the frequency of the wave and of the intensity of the electromagnetic field. The influence of low-frequency nonresonance field on the scattering and absorption of light by an atom in the ground state is considered. It is shown that the scattering (absorption and luminescence) spectra of a hydrogenlike atom may be frequency modulated by a low-frequency amplitude modulated field.
Laser induced strong-field phenomena in atoms and molecules on the femtosecond (fs) time scale have been almost exclusively investigated with traveling wave fields. In almost all cases, approximation of the strong electromagnetic field by an electric field purely oscillating in time suffices to describe experimental observations. Spatially dependent electromagnetic fields, as they occur in a standing light wave, allow for strong energy and momentum transfer and are expected to extend strong-field dynamics profoundly. Here we report a strong-field version of the Kapitza-Dirac effect for neutral atoms where we scatter neutral He atoms in an intense short pulse standing light wave with fs duration and intensities well in the strong-field tunneling regime. We observe substantial longitudinal momentum transfer concomitant with an unprecedented atomic photon scattering rate greater than 10(16)s(-1).
Summary form only given. Electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) and related phenomena such as lasing without inversion (LWI) are topics of increasing interest in quantum optics. In EIT, an otherwise absorbing medium is made transparent to a weak coherent field on resonance with a certain atomic transition by applying an intense coherent "driving" field to an adjacent transition. There has been a large number of theoretical papers and EIT was demonstrated experimentally. Up to now, most theoretical papers dealing with EIT in gas media have considered only the case of a traveling (TW) driving field. In contrast, we study EIT in Doppler broadened three-level media with standing wave (SW) driving and focus our analysis into the advantages of using a SW driving configuration instead of a TW one when the frequency of the probe field is larger than that of the driving field, i.e., the so-called frequency up-conversion regime.