Quenching of spontaneous emission through interference of incoherent pump processes

Abstract

We investigate the steady-state spontaneous emission of a V-type three-level atom, with the coherence between the two upper levels modified and controlled via incoherent pumping to a fourth auxiliary level. The external pumping gives us an easily controllable handle in manipulating the spontaneous emission to such an extent that, under certain conditions, complete quenching of spontaneous emission is possible. We also show that even the interference between the decay channels, which is considered a key requirement in spontaneous emission quenching through quantum interference, is not essential to achieve near 100% trapping and almost complete suppression of spontaneous emission. Thus we provide a scheme for spontaneous emission quenching which can be easily realized experimentally.