No Arabic abstract
In optical pumping of rubidium, a new kind of absorption occurs with a higher amplitude of radio frequency current. From measurement of the corresponding magnetic field value where this absorption occurs, there is a conclusion that it is multi-photon absorption. Both the degeneracy and energy of photons contribute to the intensity.
We present experimental and numerical studies of nonlinear magneto-optical rotation (NMOR) in rubidium vapor excited with resonant light tuned to the $5^2!S_{1/2}rightarrow 6^2!P_{1/2}$ absorption line (421~nm). Contrary to the experiments performed to date on the strong $D_1$ or $D_2$ lines, in this case, the spontaneous decay of the excited state $6^2!P_{1/2}$ may occur via multiple intermediate states, affecting the dynamics, magnitude and other characteristics of NMOR. Comparing the experimental results with the results of modelling based on Auzinsh et al., Phys. Rev. A 80, 1 (2009), we demonstrate that despite the complexity of the structure, NMOR can be adequately described with a model, where only a single excited-state relaxation rate is used.
Single photons are of paramount importance to future quantum technologies, including quantum communication and computation. Nonlinear photonic devices using parametric processes offer a straightforward route to generating photons, however additional nonlinear processes may come into play and interfere with these sources. Here we analyse these sources in the presence of multi-photon processes for the first time. We conduct experiments in silicon and gallium indium phosphide photonic crystal waveguides which display inherently different nonlinear absorption processes, namely two-photon (TPA) and three-photon absorption (ThPA), respectively. We develop a novel model capturing these diverse effects which is in excellent quantitative agreement with measurements of brightness, coincidence-to-accidental ratio (CAR) and second-order correlation function g(2)(0), showing that TPA imposes an intrinsic limit on heralded single photon sources. We devise a new figure of merit, the quantum utility (QMU), enabling direct comparison and optimisation of single photon sources.
We show that two-photon absorption (TPA) in Rubidium atoms can be greatly enhanced by the use of a hollow-core photonic bandgap fiber. We investigate off-resonant, degenerate Doppler-free TPA on the 5S1/2 - 5D5/2 transition and observe 1% absorption of a pump beam with a total power of only 1 mW in the fiber. These results are verified by measuring the amount of emitted blue fluorescence and are consistent with the theoretical predictions which indicate that transit time effects play an important role in determining the two-photon absorption cross-section in a confined geometry.
We investigate the optical Kerr nonlinearity and multi-photon absorption (MPA) properties of DSTMS excited by femtosecond pulses at a wavelengths of 1.43 {mu}m, which is optimal for terahertz generation via difference frequency mixing. The MPA and the optical Kerr coefficients of DSTMS at 1.43 {mu}m are strongly anisotropic indicating a dominating contribution from cascaded 2nd-order nonlinearity. These results suggest that the saturation of the THz generation efficiency is mainly related to the MPA process and to a spectral broadening caused by cascaded 2nd-order frequency mixing within DSTMS
We present a theory for the diffraction of large molecules or nanoparticles at a standing light wave. Such particles can act as a genuine photon absorbers due to their numerous internal degrees of freedom effecting fast internal energy conversion. Our theory incorporates the interplay of three light-induced properties: the coherent phase modulation due to the dipole interaction, a non-unitary absorption-induced amplitude modulation described as a generalized measurement, and a coherent recoil splitting that resembles a quantum random walk in steps of the photon momentum. We discuss how these effects show up in near-field and far-field interference schemes, and we confirm our effective description by a dynamic evaluation of the grating interaction, which accounts for the internal states.