Related papers: Optical pumping and relaxation of atomic populatio…
Optical pumping is fundamental to high-precision measurement using thermal alkali-metal atoms in vapor cells. In applications such as atomic magnetometry, buffer gases (e.g., $\mathrm{N}_2$ or $\mathrm{He}$) at specific pressures are…
Coherent dark states in atoms, created by simultaneous interaction of two coherent light fields with a 3-level system, are of prime importance in quantum state manipulation. They are used extensively in quantum sensing and quantum…
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…
Cavity cooling of an atom works best on a cyclic optical transition in the strong coupling regime near resonance, where small cavity photon numbers suffice for trapping and cooling. Due to the absence of closed transitions a straightforward…
Cavity enhanced light scattering off an ultracold gas in an optical lattice constitutes a quantum measurement with a controllable form of the measurement back-action. Time-resolved counting of scattered photons alters the state of the atoms…
We study the optical response of a binary system of identical atoms in which one of them is excited by an incoherent pump. %We study the properties of photon scattering, absorption and emission, together with the time evolution of the…
We apply optical pumping to prepare the lithium beam of our atom interferometer in a single hyperfine-Zeeman sublevel: we use two components of the D1-line for pumping the 7Li atoms in a dark state F,mF=+2 (or -2) sublevel. The optical…
We introduce a model description of a diatomic molecule in an optical cavity, with pump and fluorescent fields, and electron and nuclear motion are treated on equal footing and exactly. The model accounts for several optical response…
The recoil effects of spontaneous photon emissions during optical pumping of a trapped three-level atom are exactly calculated. Without resort to the Lamb-Dicke approximation, and considering arbitrary detuning and saturation of the pump…
The effect of collectivity on the loading of an atom laser via optical pumping is discussed. In our model, atoms in a beam are laser-excited and subsequently spontaneously decay into a trapping state. We consider the case of sufficiently…
We experimentally demonstrate hyperfine optical pumping of rubidium atoms probed by an evanescent electromagnetic field at a dielectric-vapor interface. This light-atom interaction at the nanoscale is investigated using a right angle prism…
Optically Pumped Magnetometers use light to drive an atomic vapor into a Non-Equilibrium Steady State for sensing. This kind of state is achieved when spin-exchange collisions, together with optical pumping, dominate the relaxation…
A near-minimal instance of optical cooling is experimentally presented wherein the internal-state entropy of a single atom is reduced more than twofold by illuminating it with broadband, incoherent light. Since the rate of optical pumping…
In a thermal ensemble of atoms driven by coherent fields, how does evolution of quantum superposition compete with classical dynamics of optical pumping and atomic diffusion? Is it optical pumping that first prepares a thermal ensemble,…
Quantum optics with giant atoms provides a new approach for implementing optical memory devices at the atomic scale. Here, we theoretically study the relaxation dynamics of a single driven three-level atom interacting with a one-dimensional…
Collective spins in thermal gases are at the core of a multitude of science and technology applications. In most of them, the random thermal motion of the particles is considered detrimental as it is responsible for decoherence and noise.…
We analyze the interference pattern produced by ultracold atoms released from an optical lattice. Such interference patterns are commonly interpreted as the momentum distributions of the trapped quantum gas. We show that for finite…
Optical spectroscopy of atoms and molecules is a field where one usually operates very far from thermal equilibrium conditions. A prominent example is spectroscopy of thin vapors, where the pump irradiation leads to a non equilibrium…
We observe a density-dependent collective suppression of optical pumping between the hyperfine ground states in an array of submicrometer-sized clouds of cold rubidium atoms. The suppressed Raman transition rate can be explained by strong…
Our work is based on the collision-induced coherence of two decay channels along two optical transitions.The quantum interference of pumping processes creates the dark state and the more atoms are pumped in this collision-induced dark state…