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Physical Review A

Self-Defocusing of Light by Adiabatic Following in Rubidium Vapor

D. Grischkowsky, John A. Armstrong

Published Oct 1, 1972• 106 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The narrow-line output of a dye laser on the low-frequency side of the $^{2}P_{\frac{1}{2}}$ resonance line (7948 \AA{}) of rubidium was self-defocused by passage through dilute rubidium vapor. The defocusing was caused by the electronic nonlinearity associated with "adiabatic following" of the laser field by the pseudomoment of the resonant atoms. By using the corresponding nonlinear dielectric constant, the wave equation was solved numerically and gave excellent quantitative agreement with experiment.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.6.1566

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The narrow-line output of a dye laser on the low-frequency side of the 2P12^{2}P_{\frac{1}{2}}2P21​​ resonance line (7948 \AA{}) of rubidium was self-defocused by passage through dilute rubidium vapor. The defocusing was caused by the electronic nonlinearity associated with "adiabatic following" of the laser field by the pseudomoment of the resonant atoms. By using the corresponding nonlinear dielectric constant, the wave equation was solved numerically and gave excellent quantitative agreement with experiment.
Short pulses of narrow-line low-intensity dye-laser light nearly resonant with the Zeeman-split 2P12^{2}P_{\frac{1}{2}}2P21​​ resonance line (7948 \AA{}) of rubidium were observed to propagate through dilute rubidium vapor as slowly as (114)c(\frac{1}{14})c(141​)c. These slow pulse velocities showed that most of the energy in the propagating wave was contained by the vapor as coherent atomic excitation. The observed pulse velocities vp{v}_{p}vp​ are in good agreement with the equation ${v}_{p}=\frac{d\ensuremath{\omega}}{\mathrm{dk}}$ for the group velocity obtained from linear-dispersion theory. Also, the experimental results are quantitatively explained by adiabatic following, in which the pseudomoments of the atoms remain aligned along the effective field of the laser light. The adiabatic-following model allows for a direct comparison of our results with the work on self-induced transparency. For high-intensity light, adiabatic following predicts a nonlinear pulse velocity and the possibility of observing self-steepening.
We report steady-state self-focusing, self-trapping, and self-defocusing of a cw dye laser beam in sodium vapor for frequencies within several Doppler widths of the DDD-line resonance transitions. We measured the variation of the beam profile as the light propagates through the vapor. We observed a 20-mW beam self-trapped in a 12-cm-long filament having a half-power diameter of 70 \ensuremath{\mu}m.
We report steady-state self-focusing, self-trapping, and self-defocusing of a cw dye laser beam in sodium vapor for frequencies within several Doppler widths of the DDD-line resonance transitions. We measured the variation of the beam profile as the light propagates through the vapor. We observed a 20-mW beam self-trapped in a 12-cm-long filament having a half-power diameter of 70 \ensuremath{\mu}m.
We studied the emission from dense rubidium vapor under 100-fs pulsed laser excitation in the 730--820 nm range. Self-focusing along with a conical emission (CE) was observed for the excitation in the blue wing of D2D2D2 atomic resonance. Self-defocusing occurred for the red-wing excitation. This is in accordance with the theory of the intensity dependent nonlinear refraction index. In the case of the CE observation, our experimental results are attributed to the self-phase modulation of the laser beam interacting with the near-resonant atomic medium.