Three-dimensional confinement of vapor in nanostructures for sub-Doppler optical resolution

Philippe Ballin (1) , Elias Moufarej (1) , Isabelle Maurin (1) , Athanasios Laliotis (1) , Daniel Bloch (1)

1 LPL - Laboratoire de Physique des Lasers

We confine a Cs thermal vapor in the interstitial regions of a glass opal. We perform linear reflection spectroscopy on a cell whose window is covered with a thin film (10 or 20 layers) of 1000 nm (or 400 nm) diameter glass spheres and observe sub-Doppler structures in the optical spectrum for a large range of oblique incidences. This original feature associated with the inner (3-dimensional) confinement of the vapor in the interstitial regions of the opal evokes a Dicke narrowing. We finally consider possible micron-size references for optical frequency clocks based on weak, hard to saturate, molecular lines

Domaines: Physique Atomique [physics.atom-ph]; Optique [physics.optics]

Philippe Ballin, Elias Moufarej, Isabelle Maurin, Athanasios Laliotis, Daniel Bloch. Three-dimensional confinement of vapor in nanostructures for sub-Doppler optical resolution. Applied Physics Letters, 2013, 102 (23), pp.231115. ⟨10.1063/1.4809668⟩. ⟨hal-00833205⟩