New studies of optical pumping, spin resonances, and spin exchange in mixtures of inert gases and alkali-metal vapors

In this thesis, we present new studies of alkali-hyperfine resonances, new optical pumping of alkali-metal atoms, and the new measurements of binary spin-exchange cross-section between alkali-metal atoms and xenon atoms.; We report a large light narrowing effect of the hyperfine end-resonance signals, which was predicted from our theory and observed in our experiments. By increasing the intensity of the circularly polarized pumping beam, alkali-metal atoms are optically pumped into a state of static polarization, and trapped into the hyperfine end-state. Spin exchange between alkali-metal atoms has minimal effect on the end-resonance of the highly spin-polarized atoms. This new result will possibly benefit the design of atomic clocks and magnetometer. We also studied the pressure dependence of the atomic-clock resonance linewidth and pointed out that the linewidth was overestimated by people in the community of atomic clock.; Next, we present a series study of coherent population trapping (CPT), which is a promising technique with the same or better performance compared to the traditional microwave spectroscopy. For miniature atomic clocks, CPT method is thought to be particularly advantages. From our studies, we invented a new optical-pumping method, push-pull optical pumping, which can pump atoms into nearly pure 0-0 superposition state, the superposition state of the two ground-state hyperfine sublevels with azimuthal quantum number m = 0. We believe this new invention will bring a big advantage to CPT frequency standards, the quantum state preparation for cold atoms or hot vapor, etc. We also investigated the pressure dependence of CPT excitation and the line shape of the CPT resonance theoretically and experimentally. These two properties are important for CPT applications. A theoretical study of "photon cost" of optical pumping is also presented.; Finally, we switch our attention to the problem of spin exchange between alkali-metal atoms and xenon gas. This mechanism is very important to the spin-exchange optical pumping. We report the first measurements of binary spin-exchange rate at high magnetic field (9.4 tesla). We present the first calculation of the magnetic decoupling curves of the binary spin-exchange rates by using two different methods, semi-classical approach (SCA) and distorted-wave Born approximation (DWBA).