Past exam of the symmetry and relativity course of the University of Oxford / 2019 / 2 / c / iii

An excited-state population lifetime $\tau$ gives a natural linewidth whose Lorentzian full width in ordinary frequency iswhen no extra dephasing broadens it. Additional thermal motion, collisions or inhomogeneity may increase the effective width. Therefore excitation is appreciable over $|D_{\mathrm{in}}{f}_0-f|\lesssim \Gamma /2$, rather than only at one event. A Lorentz line shape has nonzero wings, so ${\beta }_{\min }$ is a line-centre threshold, not a mathematically sharp cutoff of all signal. Below it, only a weak detuned wing may be excited; at it, finite-width illumination produces a broad weak precursor rather than a delta-function burst at infinity.

For a narrow line with a finite resonance time, a useful local excitation duration isNear the far-approach threshold this linear estimate becomes large and the full line shape and inverse-square illumination must be retained. After re-emission, the received full width is approximately $D_{\mathrm{out}}\Gamma$ at a fixed emission event. Lifetime memory and the changing return Doppler factor additionally produce a chirp and a redder tail.

The plots in part i use $\Gamma /f=0.02$ and $c\tau /L=0.4$, consistently corresponding to $fL/c=1/[2\pi (0.4)(0.02)]$ if the width is entirely natural. They are illustrative dimensionless parameters, not an asserted measurement for a specified atomic species.