Abstract

If a strong, near-resonant, continuous wave, radiation field is incident on a two-level atom, the well-known three-peaked resonance fluorescence spectrum persists into the steady state. For a three-level atom, the corresponding resonance fluorescence spectrum has seven peaks. Normally, when an atom undergoes continuous resonant excitation, one expects it to continuously scatter light. However, we have previously discovered conditions under which a three-level atom may experience a “steady-state quantum beat,” during which the entire scattered spectrum vanishes.^[1] If the three-level atom has two excited states each dipole-coupled to a common ground state, and if the two transition dipole moments are parallel, then there is an incident field frequency at which the atom/field system is forced into a special dressed state that is decoupled from the applied field, and all scattering ceases. The atom becomes transparent to the applied field. In this paper we investigate the effects of varying the field detuning on the widths and positions of the seven peaks in the resonance fluorescence spectrum of the V-configuration three-level atom described above.

© 1992 IQEC