Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE
Coherent spectroscopy in potassium vapor with amplitude modulated light
Silvia Gozzini, S. Cartaleva, Dimitar G. Slavov, Luca Marmugi, A. Lucchesini
Abstract
We present the first experimental observation of Coherent Population Trapping (CPT) in Potassium, obtained with kHz-frequency modulation of the laser light amplitude. It is performed by acousto-optical amplitude modulation of the radiation from an external cavity diode laser, matching the D1 line of K. The CPT resonances are detected both through K absorption and fluorescence. The resonances are studied in three kinds of K cells: i) pure-evacuated, ii) polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS)-coated-evacuated and iii) Ne-gas buffered. In all cases CPT-resonance narrowing with cell temperature is observed. In the pure-evacuated cell we registered the lowest contrast and the highest width of the resonance, while in buffered/coated cells a strong enhancement of the CPT resonance contrast up to 15% is observed. This behavior is the opposite to the one exhibited by Cs and Rb. The observed contrast enhancement in K is accompanied by more than two orders of magnitude reduction of the resonance width. The results here presented prove the advantage of using Potassium in CPT-based applications.