Paper detail

Light ellipticity and polarization angle dependence of magnetic resonances in rubidium vapor using amplitude-modulated light: Theoretical and experimental investigations

We report on experimental and theoretical investigations of the polarization dependence of magnetic resonance generated by synchronous optical pumping. Magnetic resonances with narrow linewidth are generated experimentally using a rubidium vapor cell with octade-cyltrichlorosilane (OTS) antirelaxation coating on inner walls. We studied the effect of light ellipticity on the amplitudes and widths of magnetic resonances by matching the light modulation frequency with 2 Ω_L (alignment) and Ω_L(orientation) in a Bell-Bloom interaction geometry, where Ω_L corresponds to the Larmor frequency. Both 2 Ω_L and \OmegaL resonance amplitudes showed a strong dependence on the light ellipticity. In addition, we showed that the duty cycle of light modulation changes the slope of amplitude variations in 2Ω_L and Ω_L resonances with light ellipticity. As a potential application, we showed that the difference between 2Ω_Land Ω_Lresonance amplitudes can be used for in situ measurement of light ellipticity. We also studied the dependence of 2Ω_L and Ω_L resonance amplitudes on the polarization angle of linearly polarized light. These amplitudes oscillate periodically with the polarization angle. We found this oscillatory behavior to be sensitive to the tilt in magnetic field direction from the polarization plane. Such a property could be used to realize a vector magnetometer. A density matrix based theoretical model is developed to simulate the magnetic resonance spectrum for different light polarizations. Our theoretical model accurately reproduces the above mentioned experimental observations.