Optical pumping in dense atomic media: Limitations due to reabsorption of spontaneously emitted photons

Resonant optical pumping in dense atomic media is discussed, where the absorption length is less than the smallest characteristic dimension of the sample. It is shown that reabsorption and multiple scattering of spontaneous photons (radiation trapping) can substantially slow down the rate of optical pumping. A very slow relaxation out of the target state of the pump process is then sufficient to make optical pumping impossible. As model systems an inhomogeneously and a radiatively broadened 3-level system resonantly driven with a strong broad-band pump field are considered.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figure

Dynamics of pair correlations in the attractive Lieb-Liniger gas

We investigate the dynamics of a 1D Bose gas after a quench from the Tonks-Girardeau regime to the regime of strong attractive interactions applying analytical techniques and exact numerical simulations. After the quench the system is found to be predominantly in an excited gas-like state, the so-called super-Tonks gas, however with a small coherent admixture of two-particle bound states. Despite its small amplitude, the latter component leads to a rather pronounced oscillation of the local density-density correlation with a frequency corresponding to the binding energy of the pair, making two-particle bound states observable in an experiment. Contributions from bound states with larger particle numbers are found to be negligible.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

Long-time dynamics of spontaneous parametric down-conversion and quantum limitations of conversion efficiency

We analyze the long-time quantum dynamics of degenerate parametric down-conversion from an initial sub-harmonic vacuum (spontaenous down-conversion). Standard linearization of the Heisenberg equations of motions fails in this case, since it is based on an expansion around an unstable classical solution and neglects pump depletion. Introducing a mean-field approximation we find a periodic exchange of energy between the pump and subharmonic mode goverened by an anharmonic pendulum equation. From this equation the optimum interaction time or crystal length for maximum conversion can be determined. A numerical integration of the 2-mode Schr"odinger equation using a dynamically optimized basis of displaced and squeezed number states verifies the characteristic times predicted by the mean-field approximation. In contrast to semiclassical and mean-field predictions it is found that quantum fluctuations of the pump mode lead to a substantial limitation of the efficiency of parametric down-conversion.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure

Photon-number selective group delay in cavity induced transparency

We show that the group velocity of a probe pulse in an ensemble of $\Lambda$-type atoms driven by a quantized cavity mode depends on the quantum state of the input probe pulse. In the strong-coupling regime of the atom-cavity system the probe group delay is photon number selective. This can be used to spatially separate the single photon from higher photon-number components of a few-photon probe pulse and thus to create a deterministic single-photon source.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures. revised versio