High sensitivity two-photon spectroscopy in a dark optical trap, based on electron shelving

Abstract

We propose a new spectroscopic method for measuring weak transitions in cold and trapped atoms, which exploits the long interaction times and tight confinement offered by dark optical traps together with an electron shelving technique to achieve extremely high sensitivity. We demonstrate our scheme by measuring a 5S_{1/2}-> 5D_{5/2} two-photon transition in cold Rb atoms trapped in a new single-beam dark optical trap, using an extremely weak probe laser power of 25 micro-Watt. We were able to measure transitions with as small excitation rate as 0.09 sec^(-1).