Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Jennewein, S
• Besbes, M
• Schilder, N J
• Jenkins, S D
• Sauvan, C
• Ruostekoski, J
• Greffet, J-J
• Sortais, Y R P
• Browaeys, A

Titel

Coherent Scattering of Near-Resonant Light by a Dense Microscopic Cold Atomic Cloud

Ist Teil von

• Physical review letters, 2016-06, Vol.116 (23), p.233601-233601, Article 233601

Ort / Verlag

United States: American Physical Society

Erscheinungsjahr

2016

Quelle

PROLA

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• We measure the coherent scattering of light by a cloud of laser-cooled atoms with a size comparable to the wavelength of light. By interfering a laser beam tuned near an atomic resonance with the field scattered by the atoms, we observe a resonance with a redshift, a broadening, and a saturation of the extinction for increasing atom numbers. We attribute these features to enhanced light-induced dipole-dipole interactions in a cold, dense atomic ensemble that result in a failure of standard predictions such as the "cooperative Lamb shift". The description of the atomic cloud by a mean-field model based on the Lorentz-Lorenz formula that ignores scattering events where light is scattered recurrently by the same atom and by a microscopic discrete dipole model that incorporates these effects lead to progressively closer agreement with the observations, despite remaining differences.