Interference effects in the reradiation of ultrashort electromagnetic pulses

TL;DR

This paper investigates how ultrashort electromagnetic pulses interact with atomic chains, revealing interference effects that produce diffraction-like maxima in reradiation spectra, with potential extensions to crystal lattices and thermal vibrations.

Contribution

It introduces a theoretical framework for analyzing interference effects in reradiation of ultrashort pulses by atomic chains, including thermal vibrations and extensions to crystalline structures.

Findings

Interference effects cause diffraction maxima in reradiation spectra.

Angular distributions of reradiation are derived for arbitrary atom numbers.

The approach can be extended to 2D and 3D crystal lattices.

Abstract

Reradiation of a spatially non-uniform ultrashort electromagnetic pulse interacting with the linear chain of multielectron atoms is studied in the framework of sudden perturbation approximation. Angular distributions of the reradiation spectrum for arbitrary number of atoms are obtained. It is shown that interference effects for the photon radiation amplitudes lead to appearing of "diffraction" maximums. The obtained results can be extended to the case of two- and three-dimensional crystal lattices and atomic chains. The approach developed allows also to take into account thermal vibrations of the lattice atoms.