Atom-light interaction is an essential topic in various fields in Physics. Atom-light coupling provide a great control over the quantum states of the atomic systems, which finds applications in quantum many-body physics to quantum information protocols. Controlling and manipulating the properties of a single atom is one of the greatest achievement in the last two decades of laser physics.
Lecture 1.
The atom-light interaction Hamiltonian is derived from first principles and is discussed for both length and velocity gauges for the electromagnetic field. The focus is on dipole-induced transitions, and also magnetic and higher order transitions also briefly outlined. Gauge transformations in quantum mechanics are discussed in detail.
Lecture 2. download
The Hamiltonian in the interaction and field interaction picture is discussed. The problem of a two-level atom in a classical field/pulse is studied. The excitation dynamics of the system is featured with Rabi oscillations. Analog to a spin-1/2 particle in a magnetic field is outlined. In the end, the adiabatic approximation is discussed.