Coherent inelastic backscattering of laser light from three isotropic atoms

TL;DR

This paper investigates how double and triple scattering processes affect coherent backscattering of laser light from saturated isotropic atoms, revealing that triple scattering causes faster phase decoherence and aligns better with experimental results.

Contribution

It introduces a diagrammatic pump-probe approach to analytically and numerically analyze triple scattering effects in coherent backscattering from isotropic atoms.

Findings

Triple scattering accelerates phase decoherence with increased saturation.

Including triple scattering improves agreement with experimental data.

The approach provides detailed spectral responses for multiple scattering processes.

Abstract

We study the impact of double and triple scattering contributions on coherent backscattering of laser light from saturated isotropic atoms, in the helicity preserving polarization channel. Using the recently proposed diagrammatic pump-probe approach, we analytically derive single-atom spectral responses to a classical polychromatic driving field, combine them self-consistently to double and triple scattering processes, and numerically deduce the corresponding elastic and inelastic spectra, as well as the total backscattered intensities. We find that account of the triple scattering contribution leads to a faster decay of phase-coherence with increasing saturation of the atomic transition as compared to double scattering alone, and to a better agreement with the experiment on strontium atoms.