Interaction of an atom with the radiation field in the presence of collisions. Application to the problem of frequency redistribution of light

The purpose of this work mainly consisted in (a) taking into account all the orders of the atom-radiation interaction (in a low intensity field) for strictly processing the natural enlargement over the entire spectral domain of the line and (b) simultaneously applying the unified theories of the collision enlargement to the radiation distribution problem. These redistribution formulae also drawn up by Nienhuis et al. were supposed to apply also outside the impact domain. However, it was soon realised that these results were not satisfactory since, in certain cases (observation in the wings and excitation in the centre or vice-versa), they could give rise to a negative fluorescence profile. This drawback was due to the approximation consisting in disregarding the effect of the radiative processes throughout the duration of a collision. An accurate treatment of the redistribution that no longer makes use of the incriminated approximation is presented in the appendix. In this way, new results are obtained which no longer exhibit the irregularities of those obtained in the preceding treatment and which apply from the centre of the line to the near-by quasi-static domain