Mirror-assisted coherent backscattering from the Mollow sidebands

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that mirror-assisted coherent backscattering from saturated atomic clouds produces high-contrast interference fringes, oscillating with Rabi frequency and mirror distance, revealing spectral properties of correlated scatterers.

Contribution

It introduces a novel mirror-assisted setup that enables high-contrast fringes in strongly driven atomic clouds, highlighting interference effects involving Mollow sidebands.

Findings

High-contrast fringes observed at high saturation levels

Fringe contrast oscillates with Rabi frequency and mirror distance

Setup provides a platform to study spectral properties of correlated scatterers

Abstract

In front of a mirror, the radiation of weakly driven large disordered clouds presents an interference fringe in the backward direction, on top of an incoherent background. Although strongly driven atoms usually present little coherent scattering, we here show that the mirror-assisted version can produce high contrast fringes, for arbitrarily high saturation parameters. The contrast of the fringes oscillates with the Rabi frequency of the atomic transition and the distance between the mirror and the atoms, due to the coherent interference between the carrier and the Mollow sidebands of the saturated resonant fluorescence spectrum emitted by the atoms. The setup thus represents a powerful platform to study the spectral properties of ensembles of correlated scatterers.