Power, 112 Rydberg state

The second approach is to use thermal beams of alkali atoms as shown in Fig. 10.2.4 A beam of alkali atoms passes into a microwave cavity where the atoms are excited by pulsed dye lasers to a Rydberg state. A1 /zs pulse of microwave power is then injected into the cavity. After the microwave pulse a high voltage pulse is applied to the septum, or plate, inside the cavity to analyze the final states after interaction with the microwaves. By adjusting the voltage pulse it is possible to detect separately atoms which have and have not been ionized or to analyze by selective field ionization the final states of atoms which have made transitions to other bound states. 

While ionization by linearly polarized fields has been well studied, there is only one report of ionization by a circularly polarized field, the ionization of Na by an 8.5 GHz field.36 In the experiment Na atoms in an atomic beam pass through a Fabry-Perot microwave cavity, where they are excited to a Rydberg state using two pulsed tunable dye lasers tuned to the 3s — 3p and 3p —> Rydberg transitions at 5890 A and —4140 A respectively. The atoms are excited to the Rydberg states in the presence of the circularly polarized microwave field which is turned off 1 fis after the laser pulses. Immediately afterwards a pulsed field is applied to the atoms to drive any ions produced by microwave ionization to a microchannel plate detector. To measure the ionization threshold field the ion current is measured as the microwave power is varied. 

Why microwave resonance techniques are so attractive for the spectroscopy of Rydberg states becomes clear when we estimate how much microwave power is required to drive the transitions. To drive the electric dipole ml— ni transition A... 

Most of the high precision spectroscopy of He Rydberg states has been done by microwave resonance, which is probably the best way of obtaining the zero field energies. Wing et a/.8-12 used a 30-1000pA/cm2 electron beam to bombard He gas at 10-5-10-2 Torr. As electron bombardment favors the production of low states, it is possible to detect A transitions driven by microwaves. The microwave power was square wave modulated at 40 Hz, and the optical emission from a specific Rydberg state was monitored. When microwave transitions occurred to or... 

The advent of tunable lasers created a radically new situation as to the possibility for selective excitation of high Rydberg states and for making precise measurements on their properties. Highly excited atoms are very sensitive to external fields, and currently used field ionization methods are very powerful for detecting Rydberg states. As a consequence of these circumstances, such an old problem as the Stark effect in atomic hydrogen attracted a renewed interest. 

Using a simple, three level model we can develop a feeling for the microwave powers required to observe radiatively assisted collisional energy transfer between Rydberg atoms.3 Consider the dipole-dipole atomic system shown in Fig. 15.1(a). In the Na ns + ns— np + (n - l)p resonant collisions described in the previous chapter the ns state corresponds to both s and s of Fig. 15.1(a) and the n — 1 and np states correspond to p and p of Fig. 15.1(a), respectively. The collisions occurs via the interaction... 

Using Rydberg atoms and microwave fields it has been possible to observe virtually all one electron strong field phenomena. The attraction of these experiments is that they can be more controlled than most laser experiments, with the result that more quantitative information can be extracted. The insights gained from these experiments can be profitably transferred to optical experiments. To demonstrate the latter point we demonstrate that apparently non-resonant microwave ionization, in fact, occurs by resonant transitions through intermediate states. These experiments demonstrated clearly the power of Floquet analysis of such processes, and the ideas were subsequently applied to the analogous problem of laser multiphoton ionization. 

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