Resonance fluorescence of a trapped three-level atom

Abstract

We investigate theoretically the spectrum of resonance fluorescence of a harmonically trapped atom, whose internal transitions are $\Lambda$--shaped and driven at two-photon resonance by a pair of lasers, which cool the center--of--mass motion. For this configuration, photons are scattered only due to the mechanical effects of the quantum interaction between light and atom. We study the spectrum of emission in the final stage of laser--cooling, when the atomic center-of-mass dynamics is quantum mechanical and the size of the wave packet is much smaller than the laser wavelength (Lamb--Dicke limit). We use the spectral decomposition of the Liouville operator of the master equation for the atomic density matrix and apply second order perturbation theory. We find that the spectrum of resonance fluorescence is composed by two narrow sidebands -- the Stokes and anti-Stokes components of the scattered light -- while all other signals are in general orders of magnitude smaller. For very low temperatures, however, the Mollow--type inelastic component of the spectrum becomes visible. This exhibits novel features which allow further insight into the quantum dynamics of the system. We provide a physical model that interprets our results and discuss how one can recover temperature and cooling rate of the atom from the spectrum. The behaviour of the considered system is compared with the resonance fluorescence of a trapped atom whose internal transition consists of two-levels.

11 pages, 4 Figures

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• Deterministic Single-Photon Source for Distributed Quantum Networking
• Coupling a single atomic quantum bit to a high finesse optical cavity
• Cold atoms in a high-Q ring-cavity
• Cooling atomic motion with quantum interference
• Laser cooling with electromagnetically induced transparency: Application to trapped samples of ions or neutral atoms
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Cited by in corpus (14)

• Luminescence Spectra of Quantum Dots in Microcavities. II. Fermions
• Luminescence Spectra of Quantum Dots in Microcavities. I. Bosons
• Photon Correlations from the Mollow Triplet
• Mechanical effects of optical resonators on driven trapped atoms: Ground state cooling in a high finesse cavity
• Structural transitions of ion strings in quantum potentials
• Quantum optical master equation for solid-state quantum emitters
• Resonance fluorescence of a cold atom in a high-finesse resonator
• Optomechanical damping basis
• Ion chains in high-finesse cavities
• Inelastic scattering of light by a cold trapped atom: Effects of the quantum center-of-mass motion
• Resonance fluorescence in $\Lambda$, $V$ and $\Xi$ -- type three-level configurations
• Quantum jumps induced by the center-of-mass motion of a trapped atom
• Resonance fluorescence of a laser cooled atom in a non-harmonic potential
• Rydberg electromagnetically induced transparency and absorption of strontium triplet states in a weak microwave field