Observation of Mollow triplet with metastability exchange collisions in 3He atoms

Abstract

We study the dressed states of 3 He atoms and experimentally observe the Mollow triplet (MT) induced with an ultra-low-frequency (ULF) oscillating magnetic field as low as 4 Hz. The ULF-MT signatures from the ground states of 3 He atoms are transferred to the metastable states by metastability-exchange collisions (MECs) and measured optically, which demonstrates 2 s coherence time in the dressed ground states. The result shows the possibility of ULF magnetic field amplitude measurement and a new scheme for optical frequency modulation.