Abstract
The phase relaxation of the resonance fluorescence from sodium vapor was studied by measuring the contrast of interference between the delayed fluorescence pulses. It is shown that the phase relaxation time can be measured by a conventional cw mode-locked pico-second pulsed laser without any sophisticated apparatus to actively lock the phases of exciting laser pulses. Using a modified Michelson type interferometer, and a homemade software based on FFT algorithm, we obtained a phase correlation time as 300 ps with good S/N ratio. A local minimum observed in the decay curve is attributed to the ground state hyperfine splittingand the temperature dependence of the phase relaxation time is explained by the change in the spread of atomic velocity distribution with temperature (Doppler broadening mechanism). Analytical calculation indicates that when the laser bandwidth is much broader than the linewidth of the fluorescence, as in the present case, the envelope of the interfering fluorescence signal can be represented by Fourier transform of the absorption spectra. The analysis based on this approximation are in good agreement with the results obtained in the experiment.
