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Review of Scientific Instruments

Coherent Emission Light Source

Robert B. Griffiths, Robert Henry Dicke

Published Aug 1, 1957• 5 citations
Publisher

Abstract

A sharp, intense emission line may be obtained by use of resonance radiation coherently scattered from a collimated beam of atoms. The coherently scattered light may be separated from the exciting radiation by placing the atomic beam in one arm of a Mach-Zehnder interferometer or by diffraction from several parallel atomic beam pencils. The latter technique has been tested experimentally by observing hyperfine structure in light coherently scattered from a beam of sodium atoms.

DOI
10.1063/1.1715962

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arXiv:1311.5840•Nov 22, 2013•0 citations
A sharp, intense emission line may be obtained by use of resonance radiation coherently scattered from a collimated beam of atoms. The coherently scattered light may be separated from the exciting radiation by placing the atomic beam in one arm of a Mach-Zehnder interferometer or by diffraction from several parallel atomic beam pencils. The latter technique has been tested experimentally by observing hyperfine structure in light coherently scattered from a beam of sodium atoms.
Resonant light diffraction by an atomic beam of sodium has been uncovered by careful measurements of the spatial dependence of the absorption. Recently developed modulation techniques made such measurements possible. Both on-resonance and off-resonance excitations as well as the influence of intense fields have been studied. The observed spatial behavior is in good agreement with a preliminary calculation based on the interference between the field scattered by the atoms and the excitation field.
Abstract Resonance scattering techniques are very useful for high-resolution atomic spectroscopy. The applicability of these techniques has been much extended, particularly through the rapid development of tunable-laser technology. The use of a narrow-band tunable laser, acting on a collimated atomic beam, gives a direct method enabling, for example, hyperfine structure and isotope shift studies. The intensity of lasers allows stepwise excitations to be performed, and with the two-photon absorption technique, Doppler-free measurements on thermal gases are also possible. By using pulsed lasers, time-resolved measurements yielding radiative life-times and structural information can be performed. The basic resonance scattering methods can be combined with radiofrequency and coherence techniques to yield a resolution, limited only by the uncertainty relation. Optical double resonance and level-crossing techniques, not requiring a narrow-band light source, have been extensively used. Several examples of the application of resonance scattering methods are given.
I propose to resolve the controversy over the speed of collapse of quantum-mechanical wavefunctions by means of an experimental test with a modified symmetric Mach-Zehnder atom interferometer, with non-intersecting, parallel, widely separated final beams. According to the conventional collapse scenario, the coherent twin-peak atomic wavefunction in the beams of the interferometer suffers an instantaneous collapse, at infinite speed, when the atom is captured by one of the two detectors at the ends of the beams, but it remains coherent until that instant. In contrast, according to the Hellwig-Kraus relativistic collapse scenario, the wavefunction collapses at the speed of light, backward in time along the past light cone of each detector. This leads to a premature collapse, or pre-collapse, which for a beam-to-beam separation of 3 m extends over a time span of 10 ns before arrival at the detectors. Within this time span the paired wavepackets in the two beams will be incoherent. The difference between the coherent wavepackets of the conventional scenario and the incoherent wavepackets of the relativistic scenario can be tested by probing the atomic beams with a transverse laser beam crossing them near the detectors. If the paired atomic wavepackets in the two beams are coherent, the light scattered by the two beams will also be coherent and generate a standing light wave in the space between the beams, with detectable interference fringes. If the paired wavepackets are incoherent, no such interference fringes will be generated, and the distribution of the scattered light will be that of two independent dipoles. The design parameters for this test seem to lie within reach of the techniques of atom interferometry.