Abstract
We report our study of the optical pumping effect in absorption imaging of atoms in the hyperfine spin states. Solving a set of rate equations for the spin populations in the presence of a probe beam, we obtain an analytic expression for the optical signal of the absorption imaging. Furthermore, we verify the result by measuring the absorption spectra of Bose-Einstein condensates prepared in various spin states with different probe-beam pulse durations. The analytic result can be used in the quantitative analysis of spinor condensate imaging and readily applied to other alkali-metal atoms with nuclear spin such as .
- Received 19 June 2016
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.94.023625
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