Hamburg 2009 – scientific programme

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Q: Fachverband Quantenoptik und Photonik

Q 35: Quanteneffekte: QED / Interferenz und Korrelationen I

Q 35.8: Talk

Wednesday, March 4, 2009, 15:45–16:00, VMP 6 HS-E

Coherent control of nuclear forward scattering — •Adriana Pálffy, Jörg Evers, and Christoph H. Keitel — Max-Planck-Institut für Kernphysik, Heidelberg, Germany

Resonant excitation is the key ingredient to applications in many areas of physics. To some extent, the different areas are unified by common ideas to coherently control the dynamics as it is well known from atomic systems. In nuclear physics, monochromatized synchrotron radiation and upcoming high-frequency laser sources allow for coherent photo-excitation. Such an excitation in a nuclear ensemble is of excitonic nature, leading to coherent nuclear reemission in the forward direction. The coherent decay of the collective nuclear excitation is considerably speeded up with respect to the incoherent decay channels and thus to the natural lifetime. It has been shown experimentally [1] that switching abruptly the direction of the magnetic hyperfine fields can control and even completely suppress the coherent decay channel due to destructive interference.

Here, we study more advanced coherent control schemes based on the experimental setup of [1]. We show that the accelerated nuclear forward scattering allows for the generation of two correlated coherent decay pulses out of one excitation, providing single-photon entanglement in the keV regime. Furthermore, the possibility to selectively populate excited nuclear states or metastable states by controlling branching ratios of coherently-driven transitions is addressed.

[1] Y. V. Shvyd’ko et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 77, 3232 (1995)