Optical bistability and nonlinear dynamics by saturation of cold Yb atoms in a cavity

TL;DR

This paper reports the observation of optical bistability and nonlinear oscillations in a cavity coupled to cold ytterbium atoms, supported by a simple saturation-based two-level model that matches experimental data.

Contribution

It introduces a novel experimental observation of optical bistability with cold Yb atoms and develops a simple two-level saturation model that accurately describes the phenomena.

Findings

Observation of optical bistability in cold Yb atoms

Detection of nonlinear oscillations in the system

Quantitative agreement between model and experiment

Abstract

We observed optical bistability as well as oscillations in the upper bistable branch when cold ytterbium atoms are dispersively coupled to a high finesse optical cavity. Comparable previous observations were explained by atomic density oscillations in case of a Bose-Einstein-Condensate or optical pumping in case of a cold cloud of cesium. Both explanations do not apply in our case of thermal atoms with only a single ground state. We propose a simple two-level model including saturation to describe our experimental results. This paper introduces the experimental setup, derives the mentioned model and compares it to our experimental data. Good quantitative agreement supports our model.