Transient electromagnetically induced transparency spectroscopy of ⁸⁷Rb atoms in buffer gas

Abstract

We have studied the transient response dynamics of 87Rb atomic vapor buffered in 8 Torr Ne gas through an electromagnetically induced transparency configured in Λ-scheme. Experimentally, the temporal transmission spectra versus probe detuning by switching on and off the coupling one show complex structures. The transmitted probe light intensity drops to a minimum value when the coupling light turns off, showing a strong absorption. While at the moment of turning on the coupling light at a subsequent delayed time, the atomic medium shows a fast transient response. To account for the transient switching feature, in the time-dependent optical Bloch equation, we have to take the transverse relaxation dephasing process of atomic vapor into account, as well as the fluorescence relaxation along with the optical absorption. This work supplies a technique to quantify the transverse relaxation time scale and sensitively monitor its variation along the environment by observing the transient dynamics of coherent medium, which is helpful in characterizing the coherent feature of the atomic medium.

Dependence of Rydberg-atom-based sensor performance on different Rydberg atom populations in one atomic-vapor cell

“…In the past ten years, Rydberg atomic microwave sensors [1][2][3] have made significant progress due to ravishing characteristics that classical radio-frequency (RF) microwave (MW) technology does not have, including self-calibration, [4] high sensitivity, [5,6] broad operation frequency. [2,[7][8][9][10] It has a wide range of applications, such as sensors for communication signals (amplitude modulated, [11][12][13] frequency modulated, [14] phase modulated signals [15][16][17] ), Rydberg microwave frequency comb spectrometer, [18] and imaging. [19] It has been theoretically demonstrated that measurement sensitivity limit of Rydberg atomic microwave sensor is −220 dBm/Hz, [20] which is far exceeding classical sensor sensitivity limit of −174 dBm/Hz (room temperature).…”