Research on vortex beam pumping technology of alkali metal atoms

Abstract

New quantum devices such as atomic gyroscope, atomic magnetometer and atomic clock have broad application prospects in different field. Vortex beam is a spiral phase beam. Compared with Gaussian beam, each photon of vortex beam contains orbital angular momentum (OAM). Electromagnetic induced transparency (EIT) is a kind of atomic coherence effect, which has a good performance in the transient response dynamics. In this paper, the transverse relaxation time of alkali metals is measured by EIT method. The effect of vortex beam on the electron polarizability of alkali metals is studied by comparing the relaxation time. At the same time, the improvement of polarization uniformity by vortex beam is studied from both simulation and experiment. The result shows that the polarization of alkali metals is increased via pumped by vortex beam.