ElecSus: A program to calculate the electric susceptibility of an atomic ensemble

Abstract

We present a computer program and underlying model to calculate the electric susceptibility of a gas, which is essential to predict its absorptive and dispersive properties. Our program focusses on alkali-metal vapours where we use a matrix representation of the atomic Hamiltonian in the completely uncoupled basis in order to calculate transition frequencies and strengths. The program calculates various spectra for a weak-probe laser beam in an atomic medium with an applied axial magnetic field. This allows many optical devices to be designed, such as Faraday rotators/filters, optical isolators and circular polarisation filters. Fitting routines are also provided with the program which allows the user to perform optical metrology by fitting to experimental data.