Absorption spectroscopy of xenon and ethylene-noble gas mixtures at high pressure: Towards Bose-Einstein condensation of vacuum ultraviolet photons

Abstract

Bose-Einstein condensation is a phenomenon well known for material particles as cold atomic gases, and this concept has in recent years been extended to photons confined in microscopic optical cavities. Essential for the operation of such a photon condensate is a thermalization mechanism that conserves the average particle number, as in the visible spectral regime can be realized by subsequent absorption re-emission processes in dye molecules. Here we report on the status of an experimental effort aiming at the extension of the concept of Bose-Einstein condensation of photons towards the vacuum ultraviolet spectral regime, with gases at high pressure conditions serving as a thermalization medium for the photon gas. We have recorded absorption spectra of xenon gas at up to 30 bar gas pressure of the $5p^6-5p^{5}6s$ transition with a wavelength close to 147 nm. Moreover, spectra of ethylene noble gas mixtures between 155 and 180 nm wavelength are reported.

9 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (3)

• Bose-Einstein condensation of photons in an optical microcavity
• Experimental Evidence for Inhomogeneous-Pumping and Energy-Dependent Effects in Photon Bose-Einstein Condensation
• Spectroscopy of atomic rubidium at 500 bar buffer gas pressure: approaching the thermal equilibrium of dressed atom-light states

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Vacuum-Ultraviolet Absorption and Emission Spectroscopy of Gaseous, Liquid, and Supercritical Xenon
• Two-photon excitation and absorption spectroscopy of gaseous and supercritical xenon
• One- and two-photon spectroscopy with a test of the Kennard-Stepanov relation in high-pressure two-species xenon-noble gas mixtures