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Modern Physics Letters B

COHERENT TRANSPORT OF LIGHT IN COLD ATOMS

G. Labeyrie

Published Jan 20, 2008• 32 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We present an overview of the investigations on the transport of near-resonant light in laser-cooled atomic vapors, a field that emerged during the past decade. We first discuss time-resolved measurements yielding some informations on the nature of this transport, which is quasi-diffusive for low temperatures and limited optical thicknesses. We then focus on the coherence of the transport, which is probed using the coherent backscattering interference. We identify and analyze in detail several mechanisms limiting the coherence length in such media.

DOI
10.1142/s0217984908014699

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We present an overview of the investigations on the transport of near-resonant light in laser-cooled atomic vapors, a field that emerged during the past decade. We first discuss time-resolved measurements yielding some informations on the nature of this transport, which is quasi-diffusive for low temperatures and limited optical thicknesses. We then focus on the coherence of the transport, which is probed using the coherent backscattering interference. We identify and analyze in detail several mechanisms limiting the coherence length in such media.
We use the coherent backscattering interference effect to investigate experimentally and theoretically how coherent transport of light inside a cold atomic vapor is affected by the residual motion of atomic scatterers. As the temperature of the atomic cloud increases, the interference contrast decreases dramatically. This emphasizes the role of motion-induced decoherence for resonant scatterers even in the sub-Doppler regime of temperature. We derive analytical expressions for the corresponding coherence time.
We outline the nonperturbative theory of multiple scattering of resonant, intense laser light off a dilute cloud of cold atoms. A combination of master equation and diagrammatic techniques allows a quantitative description of nonlinear diffusive transport as well as of coherent backscattering of the injected electromagnetic field, notwithstanding the exponential growth of Hilbert space with the number of atomic scatterers. As an exemplary application, we monitor the laser light's intensity profile within the medium, the spectrum of the backscattered light, and the coherent backscattering peak's height with increasing pump intensity. Our theory establishes a general, microscopic, scalable approach to nonlinear transport phenomena in complex quantum materials.
We report the first observation of coherent backscattering of light from a sample of laser-cooled atoms. Rubidium 85 atoms are captured from a room-temperature vapor in a magneto-optical trap, and illuminated with a laser probe. The angular intensity distribution of the backscattered light is recorded on a cooled CCD detector. We observe a small enhancement factor in all polarization channels, including the helicity preserving channel where the enhancement is only 1.08. This surprising observation is attributed to the existence of contrast reduction processes involving the atom's internal structure.
We study the diffusive propagation of multiply scattered light in an optically thick cloud of cold rubidium atoms illuminated by a quasiresonant laser beam. In the vicinity of a sharp atomic resonance, the energy transport velocity of the scattered light is almost 5 orders of magnitude smaller than the vacuum speed of light, reducing strongly the diffusion constant. We verify the theoretical prediction of a frequency-independent transport time around the resonance. We also observe the effect of the residual velocity of the atoms at long times.
For large bulk disordered media, light transport is generally successfully described by a diffusion process. This picture assumes that any interference is washed out under configuration average. However, it is now known that, under certain circumstances, some interference effects survive the disorder average and in turn lead to wave localizations effects. In this paper, we investigate coherence of a monochromatic laser light propagating in an optically thick sample of laser-cooled strontium atoms. For this purpose, we use the coherent backscattering effect as an interferometric tool. At low laser probe beam intensities, phase coherence is fully preserved and the interference contrast is maximal. At higher intensities, saturation effects start to set in and the interference contrast is reduced.