Discrimination of the effects of saturation and optical pumping in velocity-dependent pump-probe spectroscopy of rubidium: A simple analytical study

Abstract

This paper presents a simple analytical theory for the velocity-dependent pump-probe laser spectroscopy of $^{87}\mathrm{Rb}$ and $^{85}\mathrm{Rb}$ atoms where the pump and the probe beams are circularly or linearly polarized. The analytical solutions of the line shapes of the velocity-selective optical pumping spectroscopy [G. Moon and H. R. Noh, Phys. Rev. A 78, 032506 (2008)] and saturated absorption spectroscopy [G. Moon and H. R. Noh, J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 25, 701 (2008); 27, 1741 (2010)] obtained in the previous reports, expressed as a sum of several Lorentzian functions, could be approximated as one (or in some cases, two) Lorentzian function(s). In particular, the contributions of the saturation and optical pumping effects could be discriminated explicitly in these simple analytical solutions, which is not possible in existing theories such as Nakayama's model. The simple analytical results for the saturation spectroscopy were compared with experimental results, and good agreement between them was observed.