Light Scattering by Atoms with Internal Zeeman Degeneracy

Abstract

This thesis is about the scattering of light by atoms for the purpose of estimating the atomic quantum states and understanding how the degeneracy of the electronic energy levels may affect the scattering pattern. This thesis offers two examples: ? Quantum tomographic measurement on one- and two-atom systems by scattering photons with carefully selected polarizations. We have shown that, with a relatively simple setup, we can retrieve full information about the atomic state, solely by varying the incoming light polarization. ? Impact of the atomic internal ground state Zeeman degeneracy on intensity correlations. We show that the presence of Zeeman degeneracy reduces the intensity correlation, as compared with the case of classical scatters, which do not have any internal structure. In both cases we have limited our considerations to the single scattering with photons detected in the far field.