Cooperative effects in nuclear excitation with coherent x-ray light

Abstract

The interaction between super-intense coherent x-ray light and nuclei is studied theoretically. One of the main difficulties with driving nuclear transitions arises from the very narrow nuclear excited state widths which limit the coupling between laser and nuclei. In the context of direct laser-nucleus interaction, we consider the nuclear width broadening that occurs when in solid targets, the excitation caused by a single photon is shared by a large number of nuclei, forming a collective excited state. Our results show that for certain isotopes, cooperative effects may lead to an enhancement of the nuclear excited state population by almost two orders of magnitude. Additionally, an update of previous estimates for nuclear excited state population and signal photons taking into account the experimental advances of the x-ray coherent light sources is given. The presented values are an improvement by orders of magnitude and are encouraging for the future prospects of nuclear quantum optics.

22 pages, 4 figures, 5 tables; updated to the published version, one additional results table

References in corpus (5)

• Nuclear quantum optics with x-ray laser pulses
• Lasers as a Bridge between Atomic and Nuclear Physics
• Electric dipole-forbidden nuclear transitions driven by super-intense laser fields
• Nuclear coherent population transfer with x-ray laser pulses
• Coherent control of the cooperative branching ratio for nuclear x-ray pumping

Cited by in corpus (9)

• Dominant Secondary Nuclear Photoexcitation with the X-ray Free Electron Laser
• Expanding Nuclear Physics Horizons with the Gamma Factory
• Direct and secondary nuclear excitation with x-ray free-electron lasers
• On the feasibility of a nuclear exciton laser
• Quantum interference effects in an ensemble of ${}^{229}$Th nuclei interacting with coherent light
• Towards nonlinear optics with Mössbauer nuclei using x-ray cavities
• High-fidelity Nuclear Coherent Population Transfer via the Mixed-State Inverse Engineering
• Excitation of narrow x-ray transitions in thin-film cavities by focused pulses
• Highly efficient nuclear population transfer through physics-informed neural networks