The supplementary material contains the plot of the atomic excitation probability for a characteristic pulse time of 5 ns, complementing figure 4 in the main article. Supplementary material is structured as follows: atomsat_supplenent.tex: LaTeX file containing the figure caption and some explanatory text figure7.eps: figure file in the supplement atomsat_supplenent.pdf: compiled version of the supplementary material, could be used if there is no editorial compilation process for supplementary material.