Four-wave mixing in a non-degenerate four-level diamond configuration in the hyperfine Paschen–Back regime

Abstract

We present an experimental study of seeded four-wave mixing (4WM) using a diamond excitation scheme (with states from the $5{\mathrm{S}}_{1/2},5{\mathrm{P}}_{1/2},5{\mathrm{P}}_{3/2}$ and $5{\mathrm{D}}_{3/2}$ terms) in a thermal vapour of ${}^{87}\mathrm{Rb}$ atoms. We investigate the 4WM spectra under the application of a strong magnetic field (0.6 T). The Zeeman interaction is strong enough to realize the hyperfine Paschen–Back regime, which has the effect of separating the optical transitions by more than the Doppler width, thereby significantly simplifying the spectral features. We show that this facilitates a quantitative comparison, even in the regime of strong dressing, between experimental data and a simple theoretical model based only on four-level optical Bloch equations.

Keywords:

• Four-wave mixing
• 4WM
• FWM
• non-linear optics
• Autler–Townes splitting
• spectroscopy
• thermal atomic vapour
• hyperfine Paschen–Back regime

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Publisher’s Note

Notes

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was financially supported by EPSRC [grant number EP/L023024/1] and Durham University . CSA is supported by the EU project H2020-FETPROACT-2014 184 [grant number 640378] (RYSQ). The data-sets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available in the Durham University Collections repository (doi:10.15128/r18623hx742).