No Arabic abstract
Light scattering in dense media is a fundamental problem of many-body physics, which is also relevant for the development of optical devices. In this work we investigate experimentally light propagation in a dense sample of randomly positioned resonant scatterers confined in a layer of sub-wavelength thickness. We locally illuminate the atomic cloud and monitor spatially-resolved fluorescence away from the excitation region. We show that light spreading is well described by a diffusion process, involving many scattering events in the dense regime. For light detuned from resonance we find evidence that the atomic layer behaves as a graded-index planar waveguide. These features are reproduced by a simple geometrical model and numerical simulations of coupled dipoles.
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.
We calculate the relative permittivity of a cold atomic gas under weak probe illumination, up to second order in the density. Within the framework of a diagrammatic representation method, we identify all the second order diagrams that enter into the description of the relative permittivity for coherent light transmission. These diagrams originate from pairwise position correlation and recurrent scattering. Using coupled dipole equations, we numerically simulate the coherent transmission with scalar and vector waves, and find good agreement with the perturbative calculations. We applied this perturbative expansion approach to a classical gas at rest, but the method is extendable to thermal gas with finite atomic motion and to quantum gases where non-trivial pair correlations can be naturally included.
Collective effects in atom-light interaction is of great importance for cold-atom-based quantum devices or fundamental studies on light transport in complex media. Here we discuss and compare three different approaches to light scattering by dilute cold atomic ensembles. The first approach is a coupled-dipole model, valid at low intensity, which includes cooperative effects, like superradiance, and other coherent properties. The second one is a random-walk model, which includes classical multiple scattering and neglects coherence effects. The third approach is a crude approximation only based on the attenuation of the excitation beam inside the medium, the so-called shadow effect. We show that in the case of a low-density sample, the random walk approach is an excellent approximation for steady-state light scattering, and that the shadow effect surprisingly gives rather accurate results at least up to optical depths on the order of 15.
We experimentally study the spin dynamics of mesoscopic ensembles of ultracold magnetic spin-3 atoms located in two separated wells of an optical dipole trap. We use a radio-frequency sweep to selectively flip the spin of the atoms in one of the wells, which produces two separated spin domains of opposite polarization. We observe that these engineered spin domains are metastable with respect to the long-range magnetic dipolar interactions between the two ensembles. The absence of inter-cloud dipolar spin-exchange processes reveals a classical behavior, in contrast to previous results with atoms loaded in an optical lattice. When we merge the two subsystems, we observe spin-exchange dynamics due to contact interactions which enable the first determination of the s-wave scattering length of 52Cr atoms in the S=0 molecular channel a_0=13.5^{+11}_{-10.5}a_B (where a_B is the Bohr radius).
Efficient and versatile interfaces for the interaction of light with matter are an essential cornerstone for quantum science. A fundamentally new avenue of controlling light-matter interactions has been recently proposed based on the rich interplay of photon-mediated dipole-dipole interactions in structured subwavelength arrays of quantum emitters. Here we report on the direct observation of the cooperative subradiant response of a two-dimensional (2d) square array of atoms in an optical lattice. We observe a spectral narrowing of the collective atomic response well below the quantum-limited decay of individual atoms into free space. Through spatially resolved spectroscopic measurements, we show that the array acts as an efficient mirror formed by only a single monolayer of a few hundred atoms. By tuning the atom density in the array and by changing the ordering of the particles, we are able to control the cooperative response of the array and elucidate the interplay of spatial order and dipolar interactions for the collective properties of the ensemble. Bloch oscillations of the atoms out of the array enable us to dynamically control the reflectivity of the atomic mirror. Our work demonstrates efficient optical metamaterial engineering based on structured ensembles of atoms and paves the way towards the controlled many-body physics with light and novel light-matter interfaces at the single quantum level.