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Journal of Physics B Atomic and Molecular Physics

Fluorescence spectra and the rate of optical collisions

Gerard Nienhuis

Published Feb 28, 1982• 23 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The effect of binary collisions on the fluorescence spectrum of an atom in a nearly resonant monochromatic radiation fievd is evaluated in terms of formal relaxation and correlation operators that refer to a single collision. The driving field can be included in the atomic Hamiltonian, and its time dependence is transformed away, giving rise to a modified atom. The authors relate the strengths and the widths of line occurring in the fluorescence spectrum to the rate of optical collisions, and to other elements of the scattering matrix of the modified atom.

DOI
10.1088/0022-3700/15/4/007

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The effect of binary collisions on the fluorescence spectrum of an atom in a nearly resonant monochromatic radiation fievd is evaluated in terms of formal relaxation and correlation operators that refer to a single collision. The driving field can be included in the atomic Hamiltonian, and its time dependence is transformed away, giving rise to a modified atom. The authors relate the strengths and the widths of line occurring in the fluorescence spectrum to the rate of optical collisions, and to other elements of the scattering matrix of the modified atom.
The formal structure of the time dependence of the state of an atom in a perturber bath in an intense classical monochromatic radiation field is studied. The authors allow the cross sections of binary collisions to be affected by the radiation field. The result is used to derive an expression for the collision-broadened saturated fluorescence excitation spectrum and absorption rate in terms of a collisional relaxation operator. This operator can be related to the rate of collisionally aided radiative excitation.
The effect of collisions on the resonance fluorescence spectrum of two-level atoms excited by monochromatic resonance radiation is studied. Analysis is performed for systems where the Doppler broadening is small compared to the collision frequency (high buffer gas pressures) and for the general case where collisions arbitrarily change the phase of the radiation-induced dipole moment (from completely interrupted to completely unaffected phase of the dipole moment). Both at a relatively low and at a high excitation radiation intensity, the resonance fluorescence spectrum is shown to depend on whether the two-level system is closed or open. This is especially true for the narrow unshifted Rayleigh scattering line. It is shown that, although the absorption line is homogeneously broadened, the resonance fluorescence spectrum exhibits a clearly pronounced anisotropy. In a direction close to the direction of propagation of the excitation radiation, the Rayleigh scattering line is maximally narrowed. Under certain conditions (that can easily be created in experiments), the width of this line is proportional to the diffusion coefficient of atoms interacting with the radiation.
The effect of collisions on the resonance fluorescence spectrum of three-level atoms with a V-configuration of levels when excited by two monochromatic resonance fields has been theoretically investigated. The analysis has been carried out for the systems with a small Doppler broadening compared to the collision frequency (high buffer gas pressures) and for the general case of an arbitrary change (from complete failure to complete preservation) of the phase memory at any of the three transitions in the V-system. It has been shown that in the three-level V-type atoms excited by two monochromatic fields, the resonant fluorescence spectrum (the number of spectral lines and their widths) at one of the transitions strongly depends on the presence of resonant radiation at the adjacent transition. Under certain conditions, the line widths will be completely determined by the relaxation characteristics of the adjacent transition and, in particular, can be repeatedly narrowed with an increase in the radiation intensity at the adjacent transition. It has been shown that despite the homogeneous nature of the broadening of the absorption lines, the resonance fluorescence spectrum has a pronounced anisotropy with respect to the mutual orientation of the wave vectors of spontaneous and exciting radiation. It has been established that the line widths in the resonance fluorescence spectrum are proportional to the diffusion coefficient of the atoms interacting with radiation under certain conditions. This fact can serve as the basis for a spectroscopic method for measuring the transport frequencies of the collisions of the radiation-absorbing particles with the buffer ones. It has been shown that the effects of phase memory in the collisions lead to a strong qualitative and quantitative modification of the resonance fluorescence spectrum.
The authors derive an expression for the spectrum of fluorescence by a two-state atom in a perturber gas irradiated by nearly resonant monochromatic light of arbitrary intensity. The result is fully expressed in terms of the absorption profile that would be measured in a conventional low-intensity absorption experiment and of the rate of radiative and collisional transitions. The present result generalises previous work and the authors demonstrate that expressions obtained before in special cases are recovered by taking the appropriate limits.
We have studied the problem of a collisionally perturbed two-level atom in an intense driving field by developing a method which allows us to calculate the field-dependent collision operator in terms of the low intensity field-independent line-broadening function arising in the usual unified theory of pressure broadening. Our relations are exact to all orders in the field in the limiting case of weak collisions, but they are exact also in the complementary case of strong collisions and weak fields. We apply our results to derive explicit expressions for the rate of optical collisions, the fluorescence spectrum in the case of well-separated components, and the absorption during an adiabatic square pulse.
The authors investigate collisional redistribution in a laser field with arbitrary lineshape. The phase diffusion model cannot be correct in general due to its inherent assumption of zero correlation times. The authors give general expressions for the state of the atom, the dipole correlation function and the steady-state fluorescence spectrum in the presence of collisions and phase fluctuations with finite correlation times. It turns out that collisional effects decouple from the free-atom stochastic problem to a good approximation and that modifications due to the laser bandwidth can be quite different from collisional effects, although they are additive on a microscopic level. They evaluate the fluorescence spectrum explicitly in the limit where the three lines are well separated and show that the spectrum is determined by simple field correlation functions. The arbitrary phase fluctuations do not affect the line strengths but only the lineshapes. Collisions, on the other hand, can transfer intensity between the lines, due to the very small collision time. For free atoms and strong driving fields, the fluorescence spectrum becomes a convolution of the normalised laser spectrum with the fluorescence spectrum at monochromatic irradiation, but this does not hold any more when collisions are present.