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Light transport in cold atoms and thermal decoherence

Guillaume Labeyrie, Dominique Delande, Robin Kaiser, Christian Miniatura

quant-pharXiv:quant-ph/0603153

Abstract

By using the coherent backscattering interference effect, we investigate experimentally and theoretically how coherent transport of light inside a cold atomic vapour is affected by the residual motion of atomic scatterers. As the temperature of the atomic cloud increases, the interference contrast dramatically decreases emphazising the role of motion-induced decoherence for resonant scatterers even in the sub-Doppler regime of temperature. We derive analytical expressions for the corresponding coherence time.

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