Excitation and emission spectra of rubidium in rare-gas thin-films

Abstract

To understand the optical properties of atoms in solid state matrices, the absorption, excitation and emission spectra of rubidium doped thin-films of argon, krypton and xenon were investigated in detail. A two-dimensional spectral analysis extends earlier reports on the excitation and emission properties of rubidium in rare-gas hosts. We found that the doped crystals of krypton and xenon exhibit a simple absorption-emission relation, whereas rubidium in argon showed more complicated spectral structures. Our sample preparation employed in the present work yielded different results for the Ar crystal, but our peak positions were consistent with the prediction based on the linear extrapolation of Xe and Kr data. We also observed a bleaching behavior in rubidium excitation spectra, which suggests a population transfer from one to another spectral feature due to hole-burning. The observed optical response implies that rubidium in rare-gas thin-films is detectable with extremely high sensitivity, possibly down to a single atom level, in low concentration samples.

7 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (2)

• UV light-induced atom desorption for large rubidium and potassium magneto-optical traps
• Rb*He_n exciplexes in solid 4_He

Cited by in corpus (5)

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• Spectroscopy of Rubidium atoms in solid matrices of rare gases: experimental results and theoretical analysis
• Sub-nanometer optical linewidth of thulium atoms in rare gas crystals
• Radiative properties of rubidium atoms trapped in solid neon and parahydrogen
• Detection of atomic nuclear reaction products via optical imaging