Published in

American Physical Society, Physical Review A, 2(80)

DOI: 10.1103/physreva.80.023417

Links

Tools

Export citation

Search in Google Scholar

Laser Intensity Dependence of Photoassociation in Ultracold Metastable Helium

Journal article published in 2009 by Daniel G. Cocks ORCID, Ian B. Whittingham
This paper is available in a repository.
This paper is available in a repository.

Full text: Download

Green circle
Preprint: archiving allowed
Green circle
Postprint: archiving allowed
Green circle
Published version: archiving allowed
Data provided by SHERPA/RoMEO

Abstract

Photoassociation of spin-polarized metastable helium to the three lowest rovibrational levels of the J=1, $0_u^+$ state asymptoting to 2$s {}^{3}$S$_{1}+2p {}^{3}$P$_{0}$ is studied using a second-order perturbative treatment of the line shifts valid for low laser intensities, and two variants of a non-perturbative close-coupled treatment, one based upon dressed states of the matter plus laser system, and the other on a modified radiative coupling which vanishes asymptotically, thus simulating experimental conditions. These non-perturbative treatments are valid for arbitrary laser intensities and yield the complete photoassociation resonance profile. Both variants give nearly identical results for the line shifts and widths of the resonances and show that their dependence upon laser intensity is very close to linear and quadratic respectively for the two lowest levels. The resonance profiles are superimposed upon a significant background loss, a feature for this metastable helium system not present in studies of photoassociation in other systems, which is due to the very shallow nature of the excited state $0_u^+$ potential. The results for the line shifts from the close-coupled and perturbative calculations agree very closely at low laser intensities. ; Comment: 14 pages, 7 figures, title altered, text reduced