Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Peyrot, T
• Sortais, Y R P
• Greffet, J-J
• Browaeys, A
• Sargsyan, A
• Keaveney, J
• Hughes, I G
• Adams, C S

Titel

Optical Transmission of an Atomic Vapor in the Mesoscopic Regime

Ist Teil von

• Physical review letters, 2019-03, Vol.122 (11), p.113401-113401, Article 113401

Ort / Verlag

United States: American Physical Society

Erscheinungsjahr

2019

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

American Physical Society Journals

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• By measuring the transmission of near-resonant light through an atomic vapor confined in a nanocell we demonstrate a mesoscopic optical response arising from the nonlocality induced by the motion of atoms with a phase coherence length larger than the cell thickness. Whereas conventional dispersion theory-where the local atomic response is simply convolved by the Maxwell-Boltzmann velocity distribution-is unable to reproduce the measured spectra, a model including a nonlocal, size-dependent susceptibility is found to be in excellent agreement with the measurements. This result improves our understanding of light-matter interaction in the mesoscopic regime and has implications for applications where mesoscopic effects may degrade or enhance the performance of miniaturized atomic sensors.