Invariant treatment of coherent population trapping in an elliptically polarized field

¹ Novosibirsk State University - Novosibirsk 630090, Russia
² Time and Frequency Division, National Institute of Standards and Technology Boulder, CO 80303, USA

Received: 14 September 1998
Accepted: 25 November 1998

Abstract

Coherent population trapping (CPT), under the resonant interaction of elliptically polarized light with atoms having degenerated energy levels, is analytically treated without the use of a specific coordinate frame. Tensors describing dark states are presented in an explicit and invariant form for all atomic transitions, where CPT takes place. A correspondence between elliptical polarization vectors and pairs of unit spinors is established. It is shown that all dark states in the problem under consideration can be constructed from these spinors by taking multiple tensor products. In the case of an integer angular momentum, this general construction is reduced to a multiple tensor product of vectors.