Saturated spectroscopy
Encyclopedia
Saturated spectroscopy is the method by which the exact energy of the hyperfine transitions within an atom can be found. When a monochromatic light is shone through an atom, the Absorption cross section
is broadened due to Doppler broadening
. Saturated spectroscopy allows the doppler broadened peak to be resolved so that the exact transitions can be found.
More than a decade after the first demonstration of hole burning (or Lamb dip, a result of saturated absorption process) inside HeNe laser cavity at 1.1micron in 1962, the greater majority of SA spectroscopy research was carried out with gas lasers and molecules in the mid-infrared.
But due to the facts that SA requires high laser intensity and the gas molecules usually have widely spread strong absorption spectra only in the Mid-IR, and the slow development of compact, widely tunable Mid-IR lasers, the SA technique has not been widely used for molecular chemical analysis besides precision metrology which only been limited to the isolated wavelengths of HeNe and CO2 lasers and limited number of molecules.
Absorption cross section
Absorption cross section is a measure for the probability of an absorption process. More generally, the term cross section is used in physics to quantify the probability of a certain particle-particle interaction, e.g., scattering, electromagnetic absorption, etc...
is broadened due to Doppler broadening
Doppler broadening
In atomic physics, Doppler broadening is the broadening of spectral lines due to the Doppler effect caused by a distribution of velocities of atoms or molecules. Different velocities of the emitting particles result in different shifts, the cumulative effect of which is the line broadening.The...
. Saturated spectroscopy allows the doppler broadened peak to be resolved so that the exact transitions can be found.
More than a decade after the first demonstration of hole burning (or Lamb dip, a result of saturated absorption process) inside HeNe laser cavity at 1.1micron in 1962, the greater majority of SA spectroscopy research was carried out with gas lasers and molecules in the mid-infrared.
But due to the facts that SA requires high laser intensity and the gas molecules usually have widely spread strong absorption spectra only in the Mid-IR, and the slow development of compact, widely tunable Mid-IR lasers, the SA technique has not been widely used for molecular chemical analysis besides precision metrology which only been limited to the isolated wavelengths of HeNe and CO2 lasers and limited number of molecules.