English

Absolute absorption on the potassium D lines:theory and experiment

Atomic Physics 2015-10-05 v1

Abstract

We present a detailed study of the absolute Doppler-broadened absorption of a probe beam scanned across the potassium D lines in a thermal vapour. Spectra using a weak probe were measured on the 4S \rightarrow 4P transition and compared to the theoretical model of the electric susceptibility detailed by Zentile et al. (2015) in the code named ElecSus. Comparisons were also made on the 4S \rightarrow 5P transition with an adapted version of ElecSus. This is the first experimental test of ElecSus on an atom with a ground state hyperfine splitting smaller than that of the Doppler width. An excellent agreement was found between ElecSus and experimental measurements at a variety of temperatures with rms errors of 103\sim 10^{-3}. We have also demonstrated the use of ElecSus as an atomic vapour thermometry tool, and present a possible new measurement technique of transition decay rates which we predict to have a precision \sim 3 kHz.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1506.06651,
  title  = {Absolute absorption on the potassium D lines:theory and experiment},
  author = {Ryan K. Hanley and Philip D. Gregory and Ifan G. Hughes and Simon L. Cornish},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1506.06651},
  year   = {2015}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-22T09:57:58.742Z