Prof. Steve Cundiff lab visit---Optical two-dimensional Fourier transform spectroscopy

JILA building

JILA lab entrance poster
NIST clock

My friend Hebin Li left Texas A&M and joined Professor Cundiff's group in 2010 spring. I always wanted to visit JILA. So instead of flying to Snowmass village from Denver, I decide to rent a car and visit him and his lab.

It was Saturday. A few people were working in the lab. The lab has many projects going on. One thing which impressed me is the JILA MONSTER (Multidimensional Optical Nonlinear SpecTRometer). It is a compact ultrastable optical platform which aligns four laser pulses in box geometry. The travel time of four pulses can be set to have different combination of pulse sequences. Four pulses are phase locked with subwavelength stability.

Coherent laser beams exiting the JILA MONSTR allow the Cundiff group to study the structure of semiconductor quantum wells and the Jimenez group to compare the motions of myoglobin with heme proteins in plants.
Credit: Greg Kuebler & Alan Bristow

Hebin is currently working on the two dimensional Fourier transform spectroscopy (He actually just obtained some beautiful 3D FTS data). Optical two-dimensional Fourier transform spectroscopy (2DFTS) originates from the revolutionary development of multidimensional nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) in the 1970s which earned Richard R. Ernst the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1991. Comparing to conventional 1D spectroscopy, 2DFTS unfolds the congested spectrum onto a 2D plane to isolate spectral contributions from different excitation pathways and identify resonant couplings. The inhomogeneous and homogeneous linewidths can be determined simultaneously and unambiguously. Furthermore, the preservation of phase information in 2DFTS allows the separation of real and imaginary parts of nonlinear optical response. Using JILA MONSTR, the Cundiff group studies 2DFTS on semiconductors and dense atomic vapors and reveals new insights in quantum coherent phenomena. (This paragraph is provided by Hebin Li)

Professor Steve Cundiff will give a talk on “Two-Quantum Coherences in Optical Two-Dimensional Fourier Transform Spectroscopy” (THC2) Thursday morning.