Cooperative emission and quantum optics with atomic nuclei |
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| Ralf Röhlsberger | |
| DESY, HASYLAB, Hamburg | |
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One of the most intriguing phenomena of quantum optics is electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT): Exposing a medium to intense laser light of a certain wavelength makes it transparent for light of a different wavelength for which it would be completely opaque otherwise. EIT receives enormous interest today because allows to control optical porperties at the level of single quanta of light and matter.
With the advent of high-brilliance, accelerator-driven light sources such as storage rings or X-ray lasers, it has become attractive to extend quantum optical techniques to the X-ray regime. Recently we have shown that electromagnetically induced transparency can be observed in the regime of hard X-rays, using the 14.4 keV nuclear resonance of the Mössbauer isotope 57Fe. The key to this experiment is cooperative emission from ensembles of nuclei which are embedded in an x-ray cavity and excited by synchrotron radiation. This opens the new field of nuclear quantum optics with many interesting applications that will be discussed in this contribution. |