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April 19, 2005
Class review — 4/19
Hey Class,
Recall that Onur, Andrea, Man-Hong, and Xu Wang are giving talks on Thursday. I will provide snacks :) Also remember to put in a vote (via email) to me if you want an extra, bonus class on atomic collisions (and quantum mechanical scattering theory).
Today we talked about:
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Resonance fluorescence!
If we drive an atom with a strong laser field close to resonance, we see funky things:
The Mollow triplet - sidebands appear in the fluorescence spectrum.
Funny features in the correlation function g(2). Not only do we observe anti-bunching, but wiggles in g(2).
The dressed-state picture is useful for understanding the spectrum of the emitted light. In that picture, we have new states that are combination of the ground and excited atomic states and photon states with different occupation numbers. Spontaneous decay between the dressed states at different frequencies are possible because all of the dressed states have excited state and ground state character.
A radiative cascade picture is useful for understanding what's going on with g(2). In that picture, decay occurs between the bare states with the same photon number in the field (technically, this only makes sense for an atom in a cavity, where decay represents light that leaves the cavity). After a photon is emitted, you have to wait for Rabi oscillations to re-excite the atom. What you see in g(2) depends on when you look relative to the Rabi oscillation pi-time, and how fast the Rabi rate is compared with the spontaneous decay rate.
Cheers,
Brian
Posted by Brian at April 19, 2005 06:54 PM
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