Collective atomic scattering and motional effects in a dense coherent medium

Bromley, S.L.; Zhu, B.; Bishof, M.; Zhang, X.; Bothwell, T.; Schachenmayer, J.; Nicholson, T.L.; Kaiser, R.; Yelin, S.F.; Lukin, M.D.; Rey, A.M.; Ye, J.

Abstract

We investigate collective emission from coherently driven ultracold 88Sr atoms. We perform two sets of experiments using a strong and weak transition that are insensitive and sensitive, respectively, to atomic motion at 1 μK. We observe highly directional forward emission with a peak intensity that is enhanced, for the strong transition, by >103 compared with that in the transverse direction. This is accompanied by substantial broadening of spectral lines. For the weak transition, the forward enhancement is substantially reduced due to motion. Meanwhile, a density-dependent frequency shift of the weak transition (∼10% of the natural linewidth) is observed. In contrast, this shift is suppressed to <1% of the natural linewidth for the strong transition. Along the transverse direction, we observe strong polarization dependences of the fluorescence intensity and line broadening for both transitions. The measurements are reproduced with a theoretical model treating the atoms as coherent, interacting radiating dipoles.

Citation

Bromley, S., Zhu, B., Bishof, M., Zhang, X., Bothwell, T., Schachenmayer, J., Nicholson, T., Kaiser, R., Yelin, S., Lukin, M., Rey, A., & Ye, J. (2016). Collective atomic scattering and motional effects in a dense coherent medium. Nature Communications, 7, Article 11039. https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms11039

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Feb 15, 2016
• Online Publication Date: Mar 17, 2016
• Publication Date: 2016
• Deposit Date: Feb 10, 2020
• Publicly Available Date: Oct 29, 2021
• Journal: Nature Communications
• Publisher: Nature Research
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 7
• Article Number: 11039
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms11039
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1277174
• Related Public URLs: https://arxiv.org/abs/1601.05322