Resonance Fluorescence Lineshapes with Intense Applied Fields

Abstract

Resonance fluorescence is an old subject, which received a great deal of attention through the twenties and even into the 30’s and 40’s. R. W. Wood’s book presents beautiful pictures of it taken in the twenties. The theory was treated in great detail by Wigner and Weisskopf, and by Heitler [1,2]. It is perhaps a little startling to see the subject getting so much attention at a meeting today. There seem to be two reasons for the renewed interest. First, the development of tunable laser sources allows one to do experiments with intense, accurately resonant sources which may be coherent over many spontaneous decay lifetimes. Previous theoretical treatments of the effect have for the most part used perturbation theory which assumes that the population remains almost entirely in the ground state. This assumption is clearly not valid for the intense resonant fields now available. Further, the perturbation theory is not appropriate for exciting fields which are coherent over long periods of time. The second reason for looking at this area is that this is just the area in which it has been suggested that fruitful experiments might be carried out to test quantum electrodynamics.

Research supported in part by the National Science Foundation.