Theoretical analysis of the coherence-brightened laser in air Academic Article uri icon

abstract

  • We present a detailed theoretical study of a recent experiment in which a laserlike source is created in air by pumping with a nanosecond pulse. The source generates radiation in the forward and backward directions. The temporal behavior of the emitted pulses is investigated for different pump shapes and durations. Our analysis indicates that the spiky emission is due to quantum coherence via cooperation between atoms of an ensemble, which leads to strong-oscillatory superfluorescence. We show that these cooperative nonadiabatic coherence effects cannot be described by rate equations and instead a full set of the Maxwell-Bloch equations must be used. We consider a range of parameters and study transitions between various regimes. Understanding these coherence-brightened processes in air should lead to improvements in environmental, atmospheric remote sensing and other applications. 2013 American Physical Society.

published proceedings

  • PHYSICAL REVIEW A

altmetric score

  • 1

author list (cited authors)

  • Yuan, L., Hokr, B. H., Traverso, A. J., Voronine, D. V., Rostovtsev, Y., Sokolov, A. V., & Scully, M. O.

citation count

  • 33

complete list of authors

  • Yuan, Luqi||Hokr, Brett H||Traverso, Andrew J||Voronine, Dmitri V||Rostovtsev, Yuri||Sokolov, Alexei V||Scully, Marlan O

publication date

  • February 2013