Journal of Modern Optics
The role of hyper-Raman transitions in the radiation spectrum of a strongly driven two-level atom
Pietro Paolo Corso, L. Lo Cascio, Franco Persico
Abstract
Numerical results are presented on the spectrum of the light scattered into the vacuum modes by a two-level atom driven by a strong ramped field of frequency smaller than the natural atomic frequency. The attention is focused on the role of the hyper-Raman part of the spectrum, which is shown to decrease dramatically with increasing ramp time. It is suggested that this may explain lack of experimental observation of the hyper-Raman lines. For zero ramp time, the numerical intensity of both high-order harmonics and hyper-Raman peaks is shown to agree satisfactorily with previous analytical predictions except in the region of overlap of the two series of peaks. This lends support for the suggestion that the plateau in the spectrum is related to quantum-mechanical interference between high-order harmonics and hyper-Raman processes. There is also good agreement between the numerical amplitude of the plateau and previous analytical predictions. A physical mechanism for the cut-off frequency which terminates the plateau, based on approximate energy conservation in hyper-Raman transitions, is presented and is shown to be in agreement with present numerical and previous analytical results.