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Physical Review A

Interference effects in a two-color laser beam interaction with alkali-metal atoms

Janusz Czub, W. Miklaszewski, Jan Fiutak

Published Feb 15, 2000• 3 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The interaction of an alkali-metal atom with two different color laser beams is analyzed. The quantum interference effect is studied in weak and strong field limits. Our theoretical results are related to the recent experimental data for the ${S}_{1/2}\ensuremath{\rightarrow}{S}_{1/2}$ two-photon transition in Na and Rb atoms. It is shown that the interference profile becomes narrow for moderately strong fields and the destruction of the interference is predicted for very strong ones. The electromagnetically induced interference effects are analyzed. The role of the relaxation processes is examined.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.61.033409

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The interaction of an alkali-metal atom with two different color laser beams is analyzed. The quantum interference effect is studied in weak and strong field limits. Our theoretical results are related to the recent experimental data for the S1/2\ensuremath→S1/2{S}_{1/2}\ensuremath{\rightarrow}{S}_{1/2}S1/2​\ensuremath→S1/2​ two-photon transition in Na and Rb atoms. It is shown that the interference profile becomes narrow for moderately strong fields and the destruction of the interference is predicted for very strong ones. The electromagnetically induced interference effects are analyzed. The role of the relaxation processes is examined.
We report evidence of an interference process between two bound-free atomic transitions induced by laser fields. Sodium atoms, initially prepared in the 3P1/2{3\mathrm{P}}_{1\mathrm{/}2}3P1/2​ excited state, are ionized by a nonresonant three-photon interaction with 1064-nm laser light and by a one-photon interaction with the third-harmonic field, at 355 nm. Interference between the two transition paths allows the control of the total ionization rate by varying the relative phase of the laser fields. The experiment has provided a fringe visibility as high as 42%.
Atomic coherence and interference manifested by electromagentically induced transparency (EIT) and coherent population trapping (CPT) plays an important role in the current studies of atom-photon interactions and has found numerous applications in optical physics. EIT is created in a three-level atomic system by a coupling field and results in destructive interference between two excitation paths of a weak probe laser interacting with the atomic medium. This leads to suppressed linear absorption and rapidly varying atomic dispersion for the probe laser near the atomic resonance, which provides the platform for a variety of applications such as nonlinear optics at low light levels, slow light manipulation, and quantum state engineering for photons and atoms. Here we extend the simple three-level EIT system to more complicated and versatile configurations in a multi-level atomic system coupled by multiple laser fields. We show that with multiple excitation paths provided by different laser fields, phase-dependent quantum interference is induced: either constructive or destructive interference can be realized by varying the relative phases among the laser fields. Two specific examples are discussed. One is a three-level system coupled by bichromatic coupling and probe fields, in which the phase dependent interference between the resonant two-photon Raman transitions can be initiated and controlled. Another is a four-level system coupled by two coupling fields and two probe fields, in which a double-EIT configuration is created by the phase-dependent interference between three-photon and one-photon excitation processes. We analyze the coherently coupled multi-level atomic system and discuss the control parameters for the onset of constructive or destructive quantum interference. We describe two experiments performed with cold Rb atoms that can be approximately treated as the coherently coupled three-level and four-level atomic systems respectively. The experimental results show the phase-dependent quantum coherence and interference in the multi-level Rb atomic system, and agree with the theoretical calculations based on the coherently coupled three-level or four-level model system.
Through multiphoton ionization measurements, the polarization effects in destructive quantum interference under three-photon resonant excitation have been studied. Recent observations [V. Peet, Phys. Rev. A 74, 033406 (2006)] have indicated that contrary to the well-known pattern of a total suppression of resonance excitation, the destructive interference becomes incomplete if three-photon transition is driven by crossed beams with orthogonal polarization planes. These observations have been tested for a more general case of two-color excitation and very similar polarization-dependent anomalies in the interference character have been registered. It has been shown that the destructive interference is modified and the resonance excitation does occur if two crossed laser beams have opposite circular polarizations. The pressure-induced evolution of the uncanceled ionization peaks has the ratio of blue shift to width close to 0.5 exactly as it is known for resonance ionization peaks registered under excitation by counterpropagating laser beams.
Quantum interference and coherence effects in the interaction of atoms with the quantized electromagnetic field are investigated theoretically. A general master equation for the description of atom-field interactions is introduced. The interplay of the concepts of complementarity and interference in the time-energy domain are studied on the basis of the fluorescence light emitted by a single laser-driven atom, where the coherence of spontaneous processes gives rise to quantum interference in the spectrum of resonance fluorescence. The vacuum-induced dipole-dipole interaction in pairs of multi-level atoms is analyzed. It is shown that the interaction between orthogonal transition dipole moments of different atoms does not only influence the system dynamics crucially, but implies that the few-level approximation in general cannot be applied to near-degenerate Zeeman sublevels of the atomic level scheme. Potential applications of dipole-dipole interacting multi-level atoms for the implementation of decoherence-free subspaces and the generation of entanglement between atomic states are examined. The generation of an entangled state of the radiation field with a macroscopic number of photons is discussed on the basis of a single-atom laser.
We analyze nonlinear excitation in a four-level atomic system that exhibits electromagnetically induced transparency induced by a strong coupling laser. We show that, at the line center of the atomic transition, the nondegenerate two-photon excitation in the dressed states can be enhanced by constructive quantum interference in two excitation paths while the linear absorption is inhibited by destructive quantum interference. We report an experimental study of the interference-enhanced two-photon absorption in a multilevel Λ-type rubidium atomic system and compare the measurements with the theoretical calculations.