Coherent interaction of laser pulses in a resonant optically dense extended medium under the regime of strong field-matter coupling

Nonstationary pump-probe interaction between short laser pulses propagating in a resonant optically dense coherent medium is considered. A special attention is paid to the case, where the density of two-level particles is high enough that a considerable part of the energy of relatively weak external laser-fields can be coherently absorbed and reemitted by the medium. Thus, the field of medium reaction plays a key role in the interaction processes, which leads to the collective behavior of an atomic ensemble in the strongly coupled light-matter system. Such behavior results in the fast excitation interchanges between the field and a medium in the form of the optical ringing, which is analogous to polariton beating in the solid-state optics. This collective oscillating response, which can be treated as successive beats between light wave-packets of different group velocities, is shown to significantly affect propagation and amplification of the probe field under its nonlinear interaction with a nearly copropagating pump pulse. Depending on the probe-pump time delay, the probe transmission spectra show the appearance of either specific doublet or coherent dip. The widths of these features are determined by the density-dependent field-matter coupling coefficient and increase during the propagation. Besides that, the widths of the coherent features, which appear close to the resonance in the broadband probe-spectrum, exceed the absorption-line width, since, under the strong-coupling regime, the frequency of the optical ringing exceeds the rate of incoherent relaxation. Contrary to the stationary strong-field effects, the density- and coordinate-dependent transmission spectra of the probe manifest the importance of the collective oscillations and cannot be obtained in the framework of the single-atom model.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures, to be published in Phys. Rev.

Tissue oxygenation through combined laser and ultrasound action

The results in vivo investigation biophotonics of laser-induced photodissociation of oxyhemoglobin in cutaneous blood vessels and its role in biomedical processes are presented. It is shown that in order to make the methods of phototherapy as well as laser therapy really efficient one has to control the oxygen concentration in tissue keeping it at the necessary level. Perspectives of combined laser-ultrasound application for improving oxygen diffusion are discussed

Capture and sorting of multiple cells by polarization-controlled three-beam interference

For the capture and sorting of multiple cells, a sensitive and highly efficient polarization-controlled three-beam interference set-up has been developed. With the theory of superposition of three beams, simulations on the influence of polarization angle upon the intensity distribution and the laser gradient force change with different polarization angles have been carried out. By controlling the polarization angle of the beams, various intensity distributions and different sizes of dots are obtained. We have experimentally observed multiple optical tweezers and the sorting of cells with different polarization angles, which are in accordance with the theoretical analysis. The experimental results have shown that the polarization angle affects the shapes and feature sizes of the interference patterns and the trapping force

Directed energy transfer due to orientational broadenning of energy levels in photosynthetic pigment solutions

The directed non-radiative energy transfer through monomeric molecules of chlorophyll “a” and pheophytin “a” at high concentrations (c ~ 10⁻²) in a rigid matrix of polyvinylbutyral has been found by using the nanosecond laser spectrofluorimeter. The phenomenon is caused by orientational broadening of pigment molecular spectra owing to its interaction with a solvent. The observed temporal shift of the luminescence spectrum to the red region in a nanosecond time scale as well as the red shift of the time integrated spectrum at a high concentration of pigment molecules and the monotonic growth of the luminescence lifetime with a shift to the red region of the spectrum served as indications of the directed energy transfer in the sample. The non-radiative energy transfer from monomeric molecules towards aggregates is also directly demonstrated by the deformation of instantaneous luminescence spectra in the long-wavelength range (λ > 700 nm). The role and the possibility of the directed energy transfer between molecules with orientationally broadened spectra in the biological systems are discussed