Billiard ball echo model in the statistical quantum electrodynamics formalism

Juliana Aparecida Sales, J. Florencio

Enrique Louis, José Antonio Vergés, Cuevas Emilio

M.F. Andersen, A. Kaplan, T. Grünzweig +1 more

Raymond John Beach, Sven R. Hartmann, Richard M. Friedberg

Photon echoes in gaseous media are explained with the use of a simple heuristic model in which the atoms behave like composite billiard balls. The laser providing the excitation pulses becomes an atom smasher which "splits" the atoms and then by judicious programming puts them back together again. The most general photon-echo reordering process is explained without recourse to formal analysis so that an intuitive feeling is obtained which works equally well for the ordinary two-pulse photon echo, the Raman echo, the trilevel echo, the grating echo, etc. A formal analysis of the billiard-ball echo model is presented in its support.

Raymond John Beach, Burton Brody, Sven R. Hartmann

The billiard-ball echo model is expanded to include the effects of using sub-Doppler-linewidth lasers in photon-echo experiments. The simple heuristic model which emerges explains such echo phenomena in gases as the echo time width and the degradation of echo intensity with angling of the excitation pulses. We derive simple results in the small-pulsearea limit and give formal expressions for excitation pulses of arbitrary area.

Yehonatan Knoll