Infiltrating a thin or single layer opal with an atomic vapour: sub-doppler signals and crystal optics
Abstract
Artificial thin glass opals can be infiltrated with a resonant alkali-metal vapour, providing novel types of hybrid systems. The reflection at the interface between the substrate and the opal yields a resonant signal, which exhibits sub-Doppler structures in linear spectroscopy for a range of oblique incidences. This result is suspected to originate in an effect of the three-dimensional confinement of the vapour in the opal interstices. It is here extended to a situation where the opal is limited to a few or even a single layer opal film, which is a kind of bidimensional grating. We have developed a flexible one-dimensional layered optical model, well suited for a Langmuir-Blodgett opal. Once extended to the case of a resonant infiltration, the model reproduces quick variations of the lineshape with incidence angle or polarization. Alternately, for an opal limited to a single layer of identical spheres, a three-dimensional numerical calculation was developed. It predicts crystalline anisotropy, which is demonstrated through diffraction on an empty opal made of a single-layer of polystyrene spheres.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1409.4580,
title = {Infiltrating a thin or single layer opal with an atomic vapour: sub-doppler signals and crystal optics},
author = {Elias Moufarej and Isabelle Maurin and Ilya Zabkov and Athanasios Laliotis and Philippe Ballin and Vasily Klimov and Daniel Bloch},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1409.4580},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
to appear in Europhysics Letters, Special Issue (Proceedings of META 14-Singapore May 2014)