Regular Article

Understanding asymmetry in electromagnetically induced transparency for ⁸⁷Rb in strong transverse magnetic field

¹ Department of Physics, Sikkim University, 6th Mile Samdur, East Sikkim 737102, India
² Department of Chemistry, Sikkim University, 6th Mile Samdur, East Sikkim 737102, India

^a e-mail: ajay_t_2000@yahoo.com

Received: 23 January 2020
Received in final form: 25 April 2020
Published online: 1 July 2020

Abstract

We present the results of our experimental investigation performed for D₂ line of ⁸⁷Rb. In this work, we have studied the phenomenon of electromagnetically induced transparency of ⁸⁷Rb in presence of a transverse magnetic field and it is interesting to find the EIT spectrum shows signature of the closely lying hyperfine excited states in particular F′ = 1. We choose two different configurations for our study namely, Λ₁ and Λ₂ realised by locking probe beam at two different transition i.e. |F = 1〉 → |F′ = 2〉 and |F = 2〉 → |F′ = 2〉 respectively. We observe asymmetric features in both configurations at high magnetic field and for Λ₁ configuration we find complete conversion from transmission to absorption. We explain the observations by quantitative assessment of the impurities in the dark states which arises because of the influence of the neighbouring states. We substantiate our experimental findings with density based numerical calculations.