Strong effective saturation by optical pumping in three-level systems

Optical Pumping

T he rather odd term optical pumping means just what it says. In general “pumping” is a process of raising matter from lower to higher energy; for example, raising the potential energy of water hy moving it from an underground well to an elevated tank. In this article we shall he concerned w i t h the pumping of individual atoms from lower to higher states of internal energy. The word optical r...

Optical Pumping

Optical pumping uses light to affect the internal degrees of freedom of a sample of atoms in a vapor. These internal degrees of freedom are angular momentum states of the atomic ground state, which are populated when light is absorbed and emitted. This experiment reveals many phenomena of quantum mechanics including angular momentum selection rules, the density matrix, and resonance. Optical pu...

Noise quenching in lasers and masers by strong coherent pumping.

An intense single-mode correlated-spontaneous-emission laser or maser can be realized by driving the active atoms coherently with an injected external field. The scheme involves single-photon transitions unlike the two-photon or quantum-beat correlated-emission lasers that utilize correlations between successive photon-cascade emissions or between simultaneous emissions into two modes of the fi...

Optical frequency comb generation by pulsed pumping

Saturation spectroscopy in optically thick three-level gas media.

High-contrast transmission spectra arising from saturated absorption in optically thick Doppler-broadened threelevel media are analyzed within the formalism of Maxwell-Bloch-type equations. It is found that although in the strong pumping engine propagation-induced line narrowing and light-shift elimination occur, spectral features lying within the natural linewidth cannot be resolved.