Sensitive measurement of radiation trapping in cold-atom clouds by intensity correlation detection

Abstract

We present experimental evidence that the intensity correlations of light scattered from a cold-atom cloud are sensitive to the presence of small amounts of radiation trapping in an atomic sample of density 6 x 10(8)/cm3, with an optical depth (for a resonant light beam) of 0.4. This density and optical depth are approximately an order of magnitude less than the density and on-resonance optical depth at which effects of multiple scattering in cold-atom clouds have been previously observed [Phys. Rev. Lett. 64, 408 (1990)].