Berlin 2014 – wissenschaftliches Programm

Bereiche | Tage | Auswahl | Suche | Aktualisierungen | Downloads | Hilfe

A: Fachverband Atomphysik

A 40: Interaction with strong or short laser pulses III

A 40.4: Vortrag

Donnerstag, 20. März 2014, 14:45–15:00, BEBEL E34

On the transient optical response of atomic gases — •Michael Hofmann and Carsten Bree — Weierstrass Institute, Berlin, Germany

Femtosecond filaments are strings of intense laser light and dilute plasma in transparent dielectrics. They maintain high intensities and small beamwaists along several times the Rayleigh length, making them powerful tools for remote spectroscopy, supercontinuum generation, or femtosecond LIDAR. In 2009, an experiment [1] challenged our understanding of the physics underlying filamentation, leading to a still unresolved debate about the very nature of the optical nonlinearities that maintain filamentation.

It has recently been indicated that the main shortcomings of the standard model of filamentation are related to the perturbative, purely phenomenological treatment of the optical nonlinearities. Therefore, the controversy can only be settled by a fully quantum mechanical treatment of the atomic optical response. Here, we present a numerical method enabling us to compute the transient optical response of hydrogen-like atoms subject to strong laser fields, based on numerically solving the time dependent Schrödinger equation. This method allows us to calculate transient absorption spectra, and the impact of Autler-Townes and dynamical AC-Stark atomic level splitting therein. In particular, we discuss the contribution of laser-dressed atomic states [2] to the optical response.

[1] Loriot et al. 2009 Optics Express 17, pp. 13429-13434

[2] Richter et al. 2013 New J. Phys. 15 083012