Alain Aspect

R. Bonifacio

William A. Barletta

This book is especially concerned with fundamental theoretical and experimental aspects of relativistic beam physics, recoil, and cooling phenomena in atomic and ion beams and traps, with emphasis on coherence and collective effects. The central theme is the physics of atomic laser and free electron laser, and the development of a bridge between them through the mechanism of the so-called recoil induced gain mechanism. The links between relativistic beam physics and atomic laser physics are explored. This book is targeted at an audience of non-specialists or specialists in only one of the fields mentioned above. It addresses the following topics: Fundamentals of laser cooling and trapping of atoms: theory and experiments; Quantum optics and atomic coherence effects; Laser cooling of trapped ions; from single ion to ion crystal; Spatio-temporal instabilities in optical systems; Coherence in atom optics; atomic diffraction and interferometry; Optical lattices; nonlinear effects in laser-cooled atoms; Coherent population trapping; Two-level gain and collective recoil-induced effects; Fundamental physics of relativistic particles beams; High-gain free electron laser: theory, experiments and projects; Cooling of ion beams in a storage ring; Experiments on dense laser-cooled stored ion beams.

Varenna on Lake Como, Villa Monastero, 11-21 July 1995

Coherent and Collective Interactions of Particles and Radiation Beams

In studying the radiation-matter interaction, one can take two different approaches. The first is typical of spectroscopy: one considers the interaction between radi ation and a single atom, i. e. , one studies those phenomena in which the presence of other atoms is irrelevant. The other attitude consists, in contrast, in studying those phenomena which arise just from the simultaneous presence of many atoms. In fact, all the atoms interact with the same electromagnetic field; under suitable conditions, this situation creates strong atom-atom correlations, which in turn give rise to a cooperative behavior of the system as a whole. Cooperative means that the overall behavior is quite different from the superposition of the effects arising from single atoms and is completely unpredictable if one neglects the coup ling between the atoms induced by their common electromagnetic field. This book contains five complete and up-to-date contributions on the theory and experiments of three coherence effects in radiation-matter interaction: resonance fluorescences, optical bistability, and superfluorescence. They have raised in creasing interest in recent years from both a fundamental and an applicative view point. Even if their phenomenology appears completely different, these effects be long in the same book because they are striking examples of open systems driven far from thermal equilibrium, as those considered in Haken's synergetics and in Prigogine's theory of dissipative structures. This aspect is discussed in the in troducting chapter, in which we outline the basic physics and the essential features which unify these three effects.

R. Bonifacio

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