The effect of collisions on resonance fluorescence and Rayleigh scattering at high intensities

Abstract

The theory of the collisional and radiative relaxation of an atom perturbed by foreign-gas atoms in the presence of an intense monochromatic laser beam is developed. The spatial degeneracy of the levels and the reorientation effects of the collisions are included. The impact approximation is not made, but the Doppler effect is neglected. The spectrum of the fluorescent and scattered light is obtained from an eigenvalue problem in Liouville space using the dressed-atom approach and rotationally irreducible tensors. Minimal symmetry-adapted bases in Liouville space are constructed for linear, circular and elliptical incident polarisation. The method is illustrated for S0-P1 transitions.