Coherent Excitation of Hydrogen Atoms.

L. Vriens

J. Douglas Walker

Tobias Heupel, M. Mei, Markus Niering +4 more

We report the realization of a hydrogen atom interferometer experiment using light as the atomic beam splitter. The wave packets of hydrogen atoms excited to the metastable 2 S state are coherently split up and later recombined with the help of intense nanosecond light pulses. The pulses are generated by a novel phase-coherent source. These experiments can be seen as a step towards a precision measurement of the recoil energy of a hydrogen atom when absorbing a photon and thus of ℏ/ m hydrogen .

Stanisław Chwirot, S. Łęgowski, J. A. Slevin +1 more

The authors analyse the validity of the approximation of neglecting the 2 2 S 1/2 -2 2 P 3/2 coupling in the description of the fluorescence from the n=2 states of hydrogen atoms decaying in the presence of an external electric field. The results show the inadequacy of such an approach and point to the need for a re-interpretation of some previously reported experimental values of the state multipoles of the collisionally excited n=2 hydrogen atoms.

S. N. Tiwary, D. D. Singh

Andrey V. Lugovskoy, Igor Bray

In this paper we analyze theoretically the ``signal background'' observed in experimental studies of the radiative decay of hydrogen atoms following resonant coherent excitation (RCE) in grazing collisions with a LiF surface. The radiation intensity is evaluated by treating the RCE within a time-dependent (classical-trajectory) quantal approach, and by assuming that the excited electronic states are quenched whenever the atom-surface distance drops below a certain ``switching distance.'' Associating the mechanism of excited-state quenching with the charge transfer to the LiF conduction band we show that the hereto unexplained signal background can be attributed to the dependence of the switching distance on the incident energy.