Optical self-pumping of atoms

Evgenii B. Aleksandrov, N. N. Yakobson

Evgenii B. Aleksandrov, V. K. Prilipko, N. N. Yakobson

T. Yabuzaki, Hirokazu Hori, Masao Kitano

A theoretical study is made on the steady-state self-focusing and self-defocusing of a circularly-polarized laser beam, occurring in an atomic vapor mixed with a buffer gas at a relatively high pressure. The presence of the buffer gas removes the theoretical difficulties arising from hole-burning, the transit time, and hyperfine pumping. It also localizes the optically-pumped atoms in the vicinity of the laser beam, so that self-focusing occurs even at extremely weak light intensities. A preliminary experiment is also descirbed, the results of which show that optical-pumping self-focusing can be observed at laser intensities down to 30 µW.

T. Yabuzaki, Toru Ogawa

Celestino J. Gaeta, Jenny Lam, Richard C. Lind

Self-pumped optical phase conjugation has been demonstrated for the first time to our knowledge in a resonant atomic system. This process was implemented by using a single cw pump beam to excite a sodium-vapor oscillator. The counterpropagating optical fields inside this oscillator then combine with the pump beam in an internal fourwave-mixing interaction to yield the phase conjugate of the incident (pump) beam.

Raoul Gregory Vitale