Dipole interference for optical transitions of ions in crystals in a transverse Zeeman field

Abstract

An ion is located in a crystal at a site that is not a centre of inversion, with a Zeeman field directed at right angles to the crystal axis c. Periodic intensity variations in the optical spectrum that occur when the crystal is rotated about c are due to magnetic dipole transitions between levels of different type and to electric dipole transitions between levels having admixed opposite-parity parts of different type. Use of an antiunitary operator that commutes with the total Hamiltonian demonstrates that interference between electric and magnetic dipole radiation (or interference between any opposite-parity multipole radiation) does not occur for transitions appearing in the axial spectrum, but does occur for those appearing in the pi or sigma transverse spectrum. Depending on the site symmetry, two or four of the Zeeman components of a doublet-doublet transition have an additional periodicity as a result of this interference. Eigenstates are constructed that show the relationship between the M values of a Zeeman level, the crystal quantum number that labels it, and its type, and are used to calculate the angular dependence of certain doublet-doublet dipole transitions for ions at sites of point symmetries D2d and C3h. With explicit expressions for dipole matrix elements, it is discovered that two Zeeman components having the same angular dependence when interference is neglected exhibit dissimilar angular behaviour when the interference cross-term is included.