Related papers: Optical attenuation without absorption
Emission and absorption of light lie at the heart of light-matter interaction. Although emission and absorption rates are regarded as intrinsic properties of atoms and molecules, various ways to modify these rates have been sought in…
Coherent manipulation of quantum states of light is key to photonic quantum information processing. In this Letter, we show that a passive two-level nonlinearity suffices to implement non-Gaussian quantum operations on propagating field…
A single atom in free space can have a strong influence on a light beam and a single photon can have a strong effect on a single atom in free space. Regarding this interaction, two conceptually different questions can be asked: can a single…
Light is extensively used to steer the motion of atoms in free space, enabling cooling and trapping of matter waves through ponderomotive forces and Doppler-mediated photon scattering. Likewise, light interaction with free electrons has…
Two-photon absorption is theoretically analyzed within the semiclassical formalism of radiation-matter interaction. We consider an ensemble of inhomogeneously broadened three-level atoms subjected to the action of two counterpropagating…
We predict several effects associated with the optical response of systems prepared in a nonequilibrium state by impulsive optical excitations. The linear response depends on the phase of the electric field even if the initial…
Photoinduced biological processes occur via one photon absorption in natural light, which is weak, CW and incoherent, but are often studied in the laboratory using pulsed coherent light. Here we compare the response of a molecule to these…
Reabsorption, the multiple scattering of spontaneously emitted photons in optically thick gases, is a major limitation to efficient optical pumping and laser cooling in ultracold gases. We report mitigation of reabsorption using spatial and…
We show that it is possible to ``store'' quantum states of single-photon fields by mapping them onto {\it collective} meta-stable states of an optically dense, coherently driven medium inside an optical resonator. An adiabatic technique is…
We study the absorptive and dispersive properties of Doppler-broadened atomic media as a function of detuning. Beginning from the exact lineshape calculated for a two-level atom, a series of approximations to the electric susceptibility are…
Two-photon decay rates in simple atoms such as hydrogenlike systems represent rather interesting fundamental problems in atomic physics. The sum of the energies of the two emitted photons has to fulfill an energy conservation condition, the…
In electromagnetically-induced transparency (EIT), the absorption of a probe beam is greatly reduced due to destructive interference between two dressed atomic states produced by a strong laser beam. Here we show that a similar reduction in…
We study the light absorption and energy transferring in a donor-acceptor system with a bionic structure. In the optimal case with uniform couplings, it is found that the quantum dynamics of this seemingly complicated system is reduced as a…
Multi-photon absorption is a well-known phenomenon. With atom lasers a similar process could take place for massive particles, the ionization of an atom or molecule by the successive interaction with various particles. This process would…
The existence of the zero point electromagnetic field in the dark is a trivial property of classical electromagnetism. Splitting the total, genuine electromagnetic field into the sum of a conventional field and a zero point field is…
Resonant optical pumping in dense atomic media is discussed, where the absorption length is less than the smallest characteristic dimension of the sample. It is shown that reabsorption and multiple scattering of spontaneous photons…
The absorption of photons by atoms encompasses fundamental quantum mechanical aspects, particularly the emergence of randomness to account for the inherent unpredictability in absorption outcomes. We demonstrate that vacuum fluctuations can…
Path-entangled multi-photon states allow optical phase-sensing beyond the shot-noise limit, provided that an efficient parity measurement can be implemented. Realising this experimentally is technologically demanding, as it requires…
Together with photon emission, the absorption of a single photon by a single atom is a fundamental process in matter-light interaction that manifests its quantum mechanical nature. As an experimentally controlled process, it is a key tool…
The phenomenon of upconversion, in which a system sequentially absorbs two or more photons and emits a photon of a higher frequency, has been used in numerous applications. These include high-resolution non-destructive bioimaging,…