Spectral hole burning

Spectral hole burning is the frequency-selective bleaching of the absorption spectrum of a material, which leads to an increased transmission (a "spectral hole") at the selected frequency.

Two basic requirements must be met for the phenomenon to be observed:

  1. The spectrum is inhomogeneously broadened
  2. The material undergoes, subsequent to light absorption, a modification which changes its absorption spectrum. Typical materials include dye molecules dissolved in suitable host matrices; the frequency-selective irradiation is usually realized by a narrow-band laser.

Particular case

Most molecules and atoms always return from the excited state to the initial ground state. In some situations, however, this may not happen. For example, some organic dye molecules can undergo a photochemical reaction, which alters the whole chemical structure of the molecule. If such a photochemically active molecule absorbs light, then with a probability of a few percent it will not return to the initial, educt state, but will rather switch over to a new product ground state. Often the homogeneous absorption spectrum of the new product is much different from that of the educt, and the corresponding inhomogeneous bands do not overlap.

Spectral hole width can be expressed as follows:[1]

where is spectral hole width, is homogeneous linewidth, is the centre frequency and is the saturation intensity.

gollark: It has `Map` now.
gollark: Well, "array".
gollark: JS has an array/map distinction at least...
gollark: Adding a new element:```lualocal x = {1, 2, 3}table.insert(x, 4) -- inserts 4 at the end-- x is now {1, 2, 3, 4}table.insert(x, 2, "a") -- inserts "a" at position 2-- x is now {1, "a", 2, 3, 4}```
gollark: Defining an array-ish table:```lualocal example_table_name = {1, 2, 3, "hi", {}, "mixed types too"}```Iteration:```lualocal x = {"a", "b", "c"}for index, value in ipairs(x) do print(index, value)end-- prints 1 a then 2 b then 3 c```

References

  1. Foot, Christopher J. (2005). Atomic Phyics. Oxford. p. 157. ISBN 9780198506966.

Sources

This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.