Academic literature on the topic 'Inhomogeneous spectral line broadening'

A Raman microprobe study of as-compacted nanophase TiO2 was carried out to investigate the spatial inhomogeneity of its anatase and rutile phases. Also, changes in the observed Raman spectra (line shifts and broadening) were investigated as a function of annealing at temperatures up to 600°C in argon or air. Microscopic phase inhomogeneity is observed and Raman spectral changes are shown to result from inhomogeneous oxygen deficiency in the nanophase TiO2. The line positions corresponding to the Raman active Eg modes in both anatase and rutile are found to be sensitive to this oxygen deficiency and are potential quantitative indicators of such deviations from stoichiometry.

Conventional optical data-storage techniques, such as magneto-optic disks and CD-ROMs, record a single bit of information at each particular substrate location. In order to produce the gigabyte-class storage substrates demanded by today's computers using such conventional technologies, access to tens of billions of individual material locations is required. This brute-force approach to optical data storage has produced impressive results. However, there is increasing interest in methods for more efficiently accessing storage materials. One approach is to record multiple bits at a single storage-material location. This can be accomplished by multiplexing the bits spectrally, using differing optical frequencies to record data bits. It has been realized for over 20 years that when certain materials are cooled to appropriate temperatures, typically below 20 K, the possibility of spectrally multiplexing large numbers of bits in a single material location arises. Although this approach, known as spectral hole-burning, has been proposed as a data-storage mechanism, to date it has primarily been used as a tool to study material properties. Rare-earth-doped crystals have been demonstrated to have properties that lend themselves to a variety of different spectral hole-burning-based data-storage applications. In this article, we will review the principles of spectral hole-burning, discuss some specific material systems in which spectral hole-burning is of particular interest, and describe methods for producing high-capacity, high-data-rate spectral memories.Spectral hole-burning, and spectral memories based on spectral hole-burning, depend on a material property referred to as inhomogeneous absorption line broadening. Materials exhibiting this property contain active atoms or molecules that individually respond to (absorb) very specific frequencies of light, but the collective response of all of the material's active atoms or molecules covers a spectral region that is broad compared with the response of a particular active atom or molecule. Inhomogeneous absorption line broadening is caused by local variations in the structure of the host, which in turn lead to variations in the electronic levels of the active atoms or molecules. The absorption linewidth of an individual absorber is referred to as the homogeneous linewidth Γh, and the absorption width of a collection of inhomogeneously broadened absorption centers is referred to as the inhomogeneous linewidth Γi. Application of monochromatic light to such a material has the effect of exciting only a very small subset of active absorbing atoms—those residing in the illuminated spatial volume within a homogeneous width of the exciting light's specific frequency. If the frequency of the imposed light is shifted, a different subset of active absorbing atoms in the illuminated volume responds.

Erbium-doped “mixed” yttria-scandia (ScxY1-x)2O3 transparent laser ceramics were fabricated by vacuum sintering at 1750 °C from laser-ablated nanoparticles. Their absorption and mid-infrared emission properties were studied. The addition of Sc3+ induces a strong inhomogeneous spectral line broadening, modifies the crystal field and affects the distribution of Er3+ ions over C2 and C3i symmetry sites. Due to their broadband emission properties, Er:(ScxY1-x)2O3 ceramics are appealing for 2.8-μm lasers.

Low frequency vibrational modes of pharmaceutical molecules are dependent on the molecule as a whole and can be used for identification purposes. However, conventional Fourier transform far-infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR) and terahertz time-domain spectroscopy (THz-TDS) often result in broad, overlapping features that are difficult to distinguish. The technique of waveguide THz-TDS has been recently developed, resulting in sharper spectral features. Waveguide THz-TDS consists of forming an ordered polycrystalline film on a metal plate and incorporating that plate in a parallel-plate waveguide, where the film is probed by THz radiation. The planar order of the film on the metal surface strongly reduces the inhomogeneous broadening, while cooling the waveguide to 77 K reduces the homogeneous broadening. This combination results in sharper absorption lines associated with the vibrational modes of the molecule. Here, this technique has been demonstrated with aspirin and its precursors, benzoic acid and salicylic acid, as well as the salicylic acid isomers 3- and 4-hydroxybenzoic acid. Linewidths as narrow as 20 GHz have been observed, rivaling single crystal measurements.

Abstract In this work we present a methodological approach to the temperature dependence of photoluminescence (PL) emission spectra of the silicon-vacancy centre in diamond thin films prepared by chemical vapour deposition. The PL spectra were measured in the temperature range of 11 - 300 K and used to determine the temperature dependence of the zero-phononline full-width at half-maximum and of the peak position. Experimental data were fitted by models of lattice contraction, quadratic electron-phonon coupling, homogeneous and inhomogeneous broadening. We found that the shift of peak position and peak broadening reflect polynomial dependence on temperature. Moreover, a proper setting of monochromator slits width is discussed with respect to line profile broadening.

We investigate the features of multimode steady-state generation of the superradiant heterolasers which have an active medium formed by the quantum dots with long incoherent relaxation time and a cavity of a combined Fabry-Perot type with a distributed feedback of the counter-propagating waves. We show that a quantum-coherent dynamics of the optical dipole oscillations and a population inversion of the working levels in an ensemble of the quantum dots with a strong inhomogeneous broadening of a spectral line may lead to a simultaneous lasing of modes with a various degree of phasing and/or correlation and with qualitatively different dynamical behavior, including quasi-stationary, metastable, self-modulated, pulsed-periodic, quasi-chaotic ones.