A ring gas laser as a quantum mechanical detector of a cooperative interaction of a radiation field with an active medium

Abstract

The energy of a system composed of N two-level atoms and two counter propagating circular resonance modes in a weakly rotating toroidal ideal resonator has been found without a quantum mechanical perturbation approach. A weak rotation and a cooperative radiative interaction lead to two possible model configurations, one with nearly identical frequencies and one with different frequencies, whose difference increases with increasing rotation velocity. In the absence of rotation the perturbed frequencies (i.e. the energy of the system) are split symmetrically with respect to the unperturbed atomic frequency (i.e. the unperturbed energy of the system). A comparison of the theory with the experiment gives the estimation p_∼10 -5cm -3 for the population inversion density.