No Arabic abstract
We investigate collective emission from coherently driven ultracold $ ^{88} $ Sr atoms. We perform two sets of experiments, using a strong and weak transition that are insensitive and sensitive, respectively, to atomic motion at one microKelvin. We observe highly directional forward emission with a peak intensity that is enhanced, for the strong transition, by > $ 10 ^3 $ compared to that in the transverse direction. This is accompanied by substantial broadening of spectral lines. For the weak transition, the forward enhancement is substantially reduced due to motion. Meanwhile, a density-dependent frequency shift of the weak transition (~10% of the natural linewidth) is observed. In contrast, this shift is suppressed to <1% of the natural linewidth for the strong transition. Along the transverse direction, we observe strong polarization dependences of the fluorescence intensity and line broadening for both transitions. The measurements are reproduced with a theoretical model treating the atoms as coherent, interacting, radiating dipoles.
We develop the theory of propagation of laser wave in a gas of two-level atoms (with an optical transition frequency $omega^{}_0$) under the condition of inhomogeneous Doppler broadening, considering the self-consistent solution of the Maxwell-Bloch equations in the mean-field approximation and for one-atomic density matrix. The nonlinear effects in the atomic density $n$, caused by the free motion of atoms, are found. These effects distort the lineshape (shift, asymmetry, broadening), but are not associated with atom-atom interaction. Moreover, in the case $nk^{-3}_0<1$ (where $k^{}_0=omega^{}_0/c$) and temperatures $Tgtrsim 300$~K, these quasi-collective effects exceed the well-known influence of the dipole-dipole interatomic interaction (e.g., Lorentz-Lorenz shift) by more than one order of magnitude. It was also found that for some area of parameters, the frequency interval appears, within which the non-trivial self-consistent solution of the Maxwell-Bloch equations is absent at all. Thus, the physical picture of collective effects in a gas medium should be substantially revised.
We demonstrate continuous measurement and coherent control of the collective spin of an atomic ensemble undergoing Larmor precession in a high-finesse optical cavity. The coupling of the precessing spin to the cavity field yields phenomena similar to those observed in cavity optomechanics, including cavity amplification, damping, and optical spring shifts. These effects arise from autonomous optical feedback onto the atomic spin dynamics, conditioned by the cavity spectrum. We use this feedback to stabilize the spin in either its high- or low-energy state, where, in equilibrium with measurement back-action heating, it achieves a steady-state temperature, indicated by an asymmetry between the Stokes and anti-Stokes scattering rates. For sufficiently large Larmor frequency, such feedback stabilizes the spin ensemble in a nearly pure quantum state, in spite of continuous measurement by the cavity field.
Cooperative scattering has been the subject of intense research in the last years. In this article, we discuss the concept of cooperative scattering from a broad perspective. We briefly review the various collective effects that occur when light interacts with an ensemble of atoms. We show that some effects that have been recently discussed in the context of single-photon superradiance, or cooperative scattering in the linear-optics regime, can also be explained by standard optics, i.e., using macroscopic quantities such as the susceptibility or the diffusion coefficient. We explain why some collective effects depend on the atomic density, and others on the optical depth. In particular, we show that, for a large and dilute atomic sample driven by a far-detuned laser, the decay of the fluorescence, which exhibits superradiant and subradiant dynamics, depends only on the on-resonance optical depth. We also discuss the link between concepts that are independently studied in the quantum-optics community and in the mesoscopic-physics community. We show that the coupled-dipole model predicts a departure from Ohms law for the diffuse light, that incoherent multiple scattering can induce a saturation of fluorescence and we also show the similarity between the weak-localization correction to the diffusion coefficient and the inaccuracy of Lorentz local field correction to the susceptibility.
We report investigation of near-resonance light scattering from a cold and dense atomic gas of $^{87}$Rb atoms. Measurements are made for probe frequencies tuned near the $F=2to F=3$ nearly closed hyperfine transition, with particular attention paid to the dependence of the scattered light intensity on detuning from resonance, the number of atoms in the sample, and atomic sample size. We find that, over a wide range of experimental variables, the optical depth of the atomic sample serves as an effective single scaling parameter which describes well all the experimental data.
Light transport in a dense and disordered cold atomic ensemble, where the cooperation of atomic dipoles essentially modifies their coupling with the radiation modes, offers an alternative approach to light-matter interfacing protocols. Here, we show how the cooperativity and quasi-static dipole interaction affect the process of light propagation under the conditions of electromagnetically-induced transparency (EIT). We perform comparative analysis of the self-consistent approach with ab-initio microscopic calculations and emphasize the role of the interatomic interaction in the dipoles dynamics. Our results show that in such a dense and strongly disordered system the EIT-based light storage protocol stays relatively insensitive to configuration variations and can be obtained with essentially less atoms than it is normally needed for dilute configurations.