English

Collision-induced spin noise

Quantum Physics 2022-03-01 v1

Abstract

Collision phenomena are ubiquitous and of importance in determining the microscopic structures and intermolecular interactions of atoms and molecules. The existing approaches are mostly based on atomic or molecular scatterings, which are hindered by the inconvenience of using ultra-high vacuum and low temperature systems. Here we demonstrate a new spin-noise spectroscopic approach by measuring optical polarization rotation noise of the probe light, which operates with simple apparatus and ambient conditions. Our approach features tens of gigahertz bandwidth and one part-per-million resolution, outperforming existing spin-noise techniques. Enabled by the new technique, we observe the collision-induced spin noise of alkali atoms, and precisely determine key collision parameters, such as collision diameter, well depth, and dominant interaction type. Our work provides a new tool to study a broad range of collision phenomena under ambient conditions.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2107.04942,
  title  = {Collision-induced spin noise},
  author = {Shiming Song and Min Jiang and Yushu Qin and Yu Tong and Wenzhe Zhang and Xi Qin and Ren-Bao Liu and Xinhua Peng},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2107.04942},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

6 pages, 4 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-24T04:04:26.966Z