LAUSR

An effective method based on optical depth (OD) is presented to measure thermal equilibrium in a cell. First, the principle of determining the temperature distribution in the cell by using the OD is demonstrated. Subsequently, relevant experiments are carried out. Original experimental results showed that some gradients of OD distributions in the cell at different wavelengths and variations of the OD increased slowly along the direction of motion of the beam at a fixed wavelength. At a wavelength of 766.6839 nm, which is about 7 GHz blue shifted with respect to the potassium resonance, the average value of the OD was about 0.764 and the maximal and the minimum inhomogeneity biases among all location points were about 6.07% and 0.56%, respectively. As for the corresponding wavelengths of 766.67785 nm and 766.73004 nm, some deviations from previous results, which were caused by different absorptions of the alkali-metal atoms at different frequencies of the laser beam, were observed. The nonuniform OD values along the direction of motion of the beam reflected an inhomogeneous distribution of the temperature in the cell, which may have been caused by layout of the oven. When the layout of the oven was modified, comparative experiments comparable to these with the previous layout of the oven demonstrated that the uniformity of the temperature distribution in the cell was improved and that thermal equilibrium time was shorter by about 10 minutes. This method played an important role in determining the thermal equilibrium time in the cell.