Selective optical pumping process in Doppler-broadened atoms.

By solving the optical Bloch equations with the rate-equation approximation, we calculate the time dependence of the magnetic sublevel populations of Doppler-broadened atoms. With an increase of the left-circularly polarized pump intensity, the population fraction of a certain sublevel of the excited state almost reaches 0.3, resulting in anisotropy in the excited state, which is important to the optical filter based on circular birefringence and dichroism. Furthermore, numerical results show that the real saturation pump intensity for the moving atoms is much larger than that for the resting atoms.