Deriving spectroscopic information from intensity-intensity correlations

Abstract

We present a very simple theoretical framework for extracting spectroscopic data on an atom via stochastic probing with a fluctuating laser source. By exploiting the fact that the linear susceptibility contains all the atomic structure information in it, we show that the power spectrum of the fluctuations in the intensity radiated from an atomic sample provides the relevant, atomic-level information. The analysis we present is very general and can be applied to a wide variety of atomic and molecular systems.