Hannover 2003 – scientific programme
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Q: Quantenoptik
Q 52: Quanteneffekte 3
Q 52.3: Talk
Friday, March 28, 2003, 14:30–14:45, F107
Coherent backscattering in two-atom resonance fluorescence — •Vyacheslav Shatokhin 1, Cord A. Müller1,2, and Andreas Buchleitner1 — 1MPI für Physik komplexer Systeme, Nöthnitzer Str. 38, 01187 Dresden — 2Physikalisches Institut, Universität Bayreuth, 95440 Bayreuth
Coherent backscattering (CBS), the enhancement of the average wave
intensity
scattered off a disordered medium, is caused by the constructive
interference
of counterpropagating amplitudes in exactly the backscattering
direction. Recently, CBS has been investigated for the experimentally
perfectly controlled quantum limit of elastic light scattering by cold
atoms, for low probe laser intensities, so that the saturation of the
atomic dipole transition could be neglected [1,2]. Here,
we investigate the effect of the laser saturation parameter on the CBS
peak, as well as of the interatomic distance on the contrast of the
interference picture. Specifically,
we consider the model of two-atom resonance fluorescence in free space.
For large separations between two immobile atoms, such a system yields the
interference picture of Young’s double slit experiment, with
the atoms serving as point sources. The CBS signal is due to
the exchange of photons between the two atoms, so that we need to
address the situation in which the impact of the
atom-atom interactions on the scattered field intensity cannot be
neglected. For high enough probe intensity, the CBS interference contrast
is
expected to decrease due to the non-linear saturation of the atomic dipole
transition.
G. Labeyrie et al., Europhys. Lett. (in press), physics/0211091.
C. A. Müller et al., Phys. Rev. A 64, 053804 (2001).