High-resolution hyperfine spectroscopy of excited states using electromagnetically-induced transparency

We use the phenomenon of electromagnetically-induced transparency in a three-level atomic system for hyperfine spectroscopy of upper states that are not directly coupled to the ground state. The three levels form a ladder system: the probe laser couples the ground state to the lower excited state, while the control laser couples the two upper states. As the frequency of the control laser is scanned, the probe absorption shows transparency peaks whenever the control laser is resonant with a hyperfine level of the upper state. As an illustration of the technique, we measure hyperfine structure in the $7S_{1/2}$ states of $^{85}$Rb and $^{87}$Rb, and obtain an improvement of more than an order of magnitude over previous values.