English

Observation of suppression of light scattering induced by dipole-dipole interactions in a cold atomic ensemble

Atomic Physics 2014-10-09 v2 Quantum Gases Quantum Physics

Abstract

We study the emergence of collective scattering in the presence of dipole-dipole interactions when we illuminate a cold cloud of rubidium atoms with a near-resonant and weak intensity laser. The size of the atomic sample is comparable to the wavelength of light. When we gradually increase the atom number from 1 to 450, we observe a broadening of the line, a small red shift and, consistently with these, a strong suppression of the scattered light with respect to the noninteracting atom case. Numerical simulations, which include the internal atomic level structure, agree with the data.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1402.4167,
  title  = {Observation of suppression of light scattering induced by dipole-dipole interactions in a cold atomic ensemble},
  author = {J. Pellegrino and R. Bourgain and S. Jennewein and Y. R. P. Sortais and S. D. Jenkins and J. Ruostekoski and A. Browaeys},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1402.4167},
  year   = {2014}
}

Comments

5 pages, 5 figures