Matrix elements for spherical Gaussians

Timothy Zaklama, David K. Zhang, Keefer Rowan +3 more

Wolfgang Witschel

Schwinger's coupled-boson representation of spherical and hyperbolic angular momentum is related to spherical harmonics and is used for the calculation of matrix elements. It is shown that radial matrix elements of the two-dimensional isotropic oscillator and the closely related hydrogenic matrix elements are proportional to 3j-symbols. Matrix elements of exponentials of hyperbolic angular momentum operators which form a formal analogy to the well known rotation matrice d mm' j ( theta ) and which are written as t mm jj' ( theta ) are derived. As only elementary algebra and some operator formulae are used, the algebraic method supplements analytical and group theoretic methods.

Maurizio Verde, Christian Tomás Schmiegelow, Ulrich Poschinger +1 more

Spatially-structured laser beams, eventually carrying orbital angular momentum, affect electronic transitions of atoms and their motional states in a complex way. We present a general framework, based on the spherical tensor decomposition of the interaction Hamiltonian, for computing atomic transition matrix elements for light fields of arbitrary spatial mode and polarization structures. We study both the bare electronic matrix elements, corresponding to transitions with no coupling to the atomic center-of-mass motion, as well as the matrix elements describing the coupling to the quantized atomic motion in the resolved side-band regime. We calculate the spatial dependence of electronic and motional matrix elements for tightly focused Hermite-Gaussian, Laguerre-Gaussian and for radially and azimuthally polarized beams. We show that near the diffraction limit, all these beams exhibit longitudinal fields and field gradients, which strongly affect the selection rules and could be used to tailor the light-matter interaction. The presented framework is useful for describing trapped atoms or ions in spatially-structured light fields and therefore for designing new protocols and setups in quantum optics, -sensing and -information processing. We provide open code to reproduce our results or to evaluate interaction matrix elements for different transition types, beam structures and interaction geometries.

K. T. Hecht

Sonia Lumb, Shalini Lumb, Vinod Prasad

Transitions of an atom under the effect of a Gaussian potential and loose spherical confinement are studied. An accurate Bernstein-polynomial (B-polynomial) method has been applied for the calculation of the energy levels and radial matrix elements. The transition probability amplitudes, transparency frequencies, and resonance enhancement frequencies for transitions to various excited states have been evaluated. The effect of the shape of confining potential on these spectral properties is studied.