Ultrafast sum-frequency polarization beats in twin Markovian stochastic correlation

Abstract

An analytic closed form for the second-order or fourth-order Markovian stochastic correlation of attosecond sum-frequency polarization beat (ASPB) can be obtained in the extremely Doppler-broadened limit. The homodyne detected ASPB signal is shown to be particularly sensitive to the statistical properties of the Markovian stochastic light fields with arbitrary bandwidth. The physical explanation for this is that the Gaussian-amplitude field undergoes stronger intensity fluctuations than a chaotic field. On the other hand, the intensity (amplitude) fluctuations of the Gaussian-amplitude field or the chaotic field are always much larger than the pure phase fluctuations of the phase-diffusion field. The field correlation has weakly influence on the ASPB signal when the laser has narrow bandwidth. In contrast, when the laser has broadband linewidth, the ASPB signal shows resonant-nonresonant cross correlation, and the sensitivities of ASPB signal to three Markovian stochastic models increase as time delay is increased. A Doppler-free precision in the measurement of the energy-level sum can be achieved with an arbitrary bandwidth. The advantage of ASPB is that the ultrafast modulation period 900as can still be improved, because the energy-level interval between ground state and excited state can be widely separated.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Chinese National Nature Sciences Foundation (Grant No. 60308002), a Foundation for the Author of National Excellent Doctoral Dissertation of PR China (Grant No. 200339) and the Ministry of Sciences and Technology of China through 973-project under grant 2002CB613305.