Date of Award

2026

Document Type

Honors Thesis (Open Access)

Department

Colby College. Physics and Astronomy Dept.

Advisor(s)

Duncan Tate

Abstract

Electromagnetically Induced Transparency detection of high-lying Rydberg states in room-temperature rubidium vapor was investigated using a four state ladder-type excitation scheme with light provided by three External Cavity Diode Lasers (ECDLs) at 780 nm, 776 nm, and 1266 nm. This detection technique was studied by characterizing the lineshape parameters of the EIT transmission peak, specifically the height, width and area of the transparency window as functions of the dressing and coupling laser powers. With the goal of characterizing the linewidth of the transmission signal, a confocal etalon was built and implemented in the optical setup to perform frequency calibration of the EIT spectra. Our experimental results indicate that the EIT transmission peak exhibits a non-monotonic dependence on laser power as we observed that the signal initially increases in amplitude, reaches a maximum value and then decays gradually at higher powers. We also observed power broadening of the linewidth at low dressing powers with constant coupling power, and saturation of the broadening in the middle to high dressing power regime. The EIT linewidth was observed to be approximately constant with varying coupling power in the power regimes studied in this experiment.

Keywords

Rydberg atom, Three-photon Electromagnetically Induced Transparency Rubidium, Spectral profile

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