Byung Kyu Park's Personal Website

I’ve been looking at Chapters 6 and 11 of Prof. Happer’s Optically Pumped Atoms (for sections about excited state depolarization by collisions with buffer gas), but I fear I don’t really understand them—exactly how the mathematics correspond to physics, and exactly how the spin-exchange with fictitious atom produces the pressure broadening (without also causing depolarization of ground state).

Well, so it looks like I’ll be sticking with the devil I know: writing terms into my optical Bloch equations to model pressure broadening and excited state depolarization piece by piece … in physically (and least to me) intuitive terms.

Maybe one day I’ll understand Prof. Happer’s approach.

This was taken last week, in front of Le Conte. See anything wrong in the picture?