Abstract

It is clearly of importance to have a quantitative understanding of the propagation of laser beams through materials, yet even the fundamental case of near-resonant propagation through a pure atomic vapour appears, rather surprisingly, not to have been tested in fully quantitative terms. The problem seems to be that an allowed optical dipole transition involving atoms in a vapour (as contrasted with an atomic beam) necessarily involves more than two (sub)states. Such a problem is not only hard to model in detail, but is quite challenging to test experimentally for a given model, once evaluated.

© 1988 Optical Society of America