The concept of resonant perfect absorption, enabled by the combined action of pulse propagation and an auxiliary gate pulse, was recently proposed and demonstrated in a group of two-level systems [Y. He et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 129, 273201 (2022)]. Here we exploit this method in a more realistic scenario by solving the coupled time-dependent Schrödinger equation and the Maxwell wave equation in helium. Through emptying the population of the $1s2p$ excited state after its excitation, we explore the evolution of the spectral profile with time delay and propagation distance and link the observations to the controlled interference between the original field and the gated new field. We find that resonant absorption for higher-lying states can also be strongly enhanced, in spite of the congestion of multiple resonances and the presence of complex laser-induced couplings. Our results show that interferometric control of absorption using intense laser fields can be applied selectively in both the temporal and spatial domains.

• Received 2 October 2023
• Accepted 14 December 2023

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.6.013103

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI. Open access publication funded by the Max Planck Society.

Published by the American Physical Society