Rate equations for the optical pumping of alkali-metal vapors simultaneously subject to pumping, relaxation in the excited state, and relaxation in the ground state are shown to yield analytic solutions for the alkali-metal electronic and nuclear-spin polarizations in the limit of weak pumping. Nuclear-spin and hyperfine-interaction effects are properly included. Analysis of the double-exponential form of the pumping transient of the ground-state electronic-spin polarization is shown to yield new methods for the measurement of cross sections for collisional relaxation in both the ground and excited states. Formulas are derived that relate relaxation cross sections to experimentally measurable parameters. Formulas describing the influence of nuclear spin on signals obtained from standard depolarization of resonance-radiation experiments also are provided. Ambiguities in earlier optical-pumping experiments and calculations arising from oversimplified descriptions of relaxation processes are discussed.
A vapor of paramagnetic atoms, under conditions in which electronic spin exchange takes place faster than collisional spin relaxation, should acquire a spontaneous spin polarization when illuminated by unpolarized light tuned to excite only certain ground-state atomic hyperfine levels. In magnetic fields above a certain size, the atomic polarization has two stable states, either parallel or antiparallel to the field. Experiments to demonstrate this effect and explore possible applications may be feasible by the use of alkali-metal vapors.
We report results of measurements and theoretical modeling of spontaneous spin polarization and associated hysteresis in an optically pumped Cs vapor. We observe hysteresis over the full range (20--450 torr) of
N2 buffer gas pressures tested, and on two hyperfine components of the
D1 transition, so long as both electronic spin exchange and optical pumping of a resolved ground state hyperfine level take place faster than spin relaxation. On the $F=\stackrel{\ensuremath{\rightarrow}}{3}{F}_{e}=4$ transition, the spin angular momentum is gained from the linearly polarized pump light, while on the $\stackrel{\ensuremath{\rightarrow}}{3}3$ transition, it comes instead from the buffer gas during collisional quenching. The density-matrix theoretical model we have developed includes the effects of coherence in the excited state. It reproduces all observed features of spontaneous polarization, including hysteresis curves in quantitative agreement with the data across a broad range of experimental parameters.