Photon Transport through Dense Atomic Vapor

This book presents the study of infrared light propagation in hot cesium vapors. This work was carried out in Department of Physics, Central Michigan University, Mount Pleasant, MI in 2010 for Masters thesis. In this book, brief introduction about Levy flight is presented, which is followed by simple mathematical interpretation and experimental investigations. An experimental investigation of beam transmission as a function of vapor density shows that while a monochromatic light spreads in manner characteristic for a normal diffusion, transport of nonmonochromatic atomic fluorescence shows properties of Levy flights. A simple model gives a good quantitative account of most of our experimental results. However, yet unexplained presence of fluorescence components practically immune to scattering must be dealt with before a fully consistent picture of the scattering process can be claimed.