Rabi oscillations of Morris-Shore transformed $N$-state systems by elliptically polarized ultrafast laser pulses

TL;DR

This paper experimentally demonstrates that ultrafast laser-driven Rabi oscillations in multi-state rubidium systems can be simplified to a sum of two independent two-state oscillations using the Morris-Shore transformation, enabling better control of photo-electron polarization.

Contribution

It shows that complex multi-state Rabi dynamics can be reduced to simpler independent two-state systems via the Morris-Shore transformation in ultrafast laser interactions.

Findings

Multi-state Rabi oscillations reduce to two independent oscillations.

Morris-Shore transformation simplifies complex atomic dynamics.

Implications for controlling photo-electron polarization.

Abstract

We present an experimental investigation of ultrafast-laser driven Rabi oscillations of atomic rubidium. Since the broadband spectrum of an ultrafast laser pulse simultaneously couples all the electronic hyperfine transitions between the excited and ground states, the complex excitation linkages involved with the D1 or D2 transition are energy degenerate. Here, by applying the Morris-Shore transformation, it is shown that this multi-state system is reduced to a set of independent two-state systems and dark states. In experiments performed by ultrafast laser interactions of atomic rubidium in the strong interaction regime, we demonstrate that the ultrafast dynamics of the considered multi-state system is governed by a sum of at most two decoupled Rabi oscillations when this system interacts with ultrafast laser pulses of any polarization state. We further show the implication of this result to possible controls of photo-electron polarizations.