Sensitive magnetometers based on dark states

Abstract

24 In recent years interest has been growing into the fascinating properties of dark resonances. Most of the experiments have been carried out in alkali atoms due to their favourable level structure and the commercially available diode lasers, resulting in numerous applications. Teams from Siena and Sofia developed an all-optical magnetometer based on such dark resonances. The dark-state effect was discovered in 1976 by G. Alzetta, A. Gozzini, L. Moi and G. Orriols [1], while they were working on optical-pumping experiments with a multimode dye laser. They wanted to make the observation of multi-photon radio-frequency resonances in sodium atoms easy, i.e., observable by the naked eye. To this end, they introduced a magnetic field (MF) that was constant in time but spatially inhomogeneous along the laser beam, so as to produce Zeeman splitting of groundstate hyperfine levels (Fig.1a, left). In this way, an applied radio-frequency field was resonant only if it matched the Zeeman splitting. As a result, a bright radio-frequency resonance appeared (Fig.1a, right). During these experiments, besides the bright resonances, a new “dark” resonance was observed, which does not require any radio-frequency field. In the introductory illustration only the dark resonance is shown. The new dark state (DS) effect appears in a position along the laser beam where the frequency difference (ω10-ω20) between two optical frequencies is equal to the frequency splitting ω12 between two Zeeman sublevels (Fig.1b, left). This is the resonant condition for the stimulated Raman transitions between the two longliving ground levels. Theoretical studies described the dark resonance as a coherent superposition of two long-living ground levels prepared by the bi-chromatic laser field, and ‘atomic population trapping’ was introduced, leading to the term Coherent Population Trapping (CPT) [2]. l Luigi Moi1, Stefka Cartaleva2 DOI: 10.1051/epn/2012603