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

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