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arXiv:0706.3945 · Physical Review Letters

Slow Light with Integrated Gain and Large Pulse Delay

Irina V. Novikova, David F. Phillips, Ronald Lee Walsworth

Published Oct 26, 2007• 61 citations
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Abstract

We demonstrate slow and stored light in Rb vapor with a combination of desirable features: minimal loss and distortion of the pulse shape, and large fractional delay (>10). This behavior is enabled by (i) a group index that can be controllably varied during light pulse propagation, and (ii) controllable gain integrated into the medium to compensate for pulse loss. Any medium with the above two characteristics should be able to realize similarly high-performance slow light.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.99.173604

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We demonstrate slow and stored light in Rb vapor with a combination of desirable features: minimal loss and distortion of the pulse shape, and large fractional delay (>10). This behavior is enabled by (i) a group index that can be controllably varied during light pulse propagation, and (ii) controllable gain integrated into the medium to compensate for pulse loss. Any medium with the above two characteristics should be able to realize similarly high-performance slow light.
We study ultrabroadband slow light in a warm rubidium vapor cell. By working between the D1 and D2 transitions, we find a several-nanometer window centered at 788.4 nm in which the group index is highly uniform and the absorption is small (<1%). We demonstrate that we can control the group delay by varying the temperature of the cell, and we observe a tunable fractional delay of 18 for pulses as short as 250 fs (6.9 nm bandwidth) with a fractional broadening of only 0.65 and a power leakage of 55%. We find that a simple theoretical model is in excellent agreement with the experimental results. Using this model, we discuss the impact of the pulse’s spectral characteristics on the distortion it incurs during propagation through the vapor.
We study analytically pulse distortion in linear slow light systems, and provide some useful limits on these devices. Additionally, we also show that the contributions of phase and amplitude broadening can be de-coupled and quantified. It is observed that phase broadening is generally smaller than amplitude broadening in conventional slow light media (lorentzian gain profile) except for very large fractional delays, where it becomes larger. Upon these expressions, we may envisage new strategies to minimize the distortion in the delaying of pulses, depending on the specific application and the required fractional delay. To overcome the residual distortion, we show that nonlinear systems can lead to a resharpening of the pulses and a re-generation of the filtered frequencies.
We study slow-light propagation dynamics in warm Rb vapor. We present data showing significant pulse reshaping when the bandwidth of the pulses is increased and present a model that qualitatively explains the observed behavior. Our data and modeling emphasize how the Doppler broadening in a warm vapor strongly affects the propagation of high-frequency components and leads to unintuitive features on the transmitted pulse shapes. This has important consequences for applications involving the delay of large-bandwidth pulses.
We consider the propagation of a light pulse in a medium with a single resonance. If the frequency of the pulse is tuned far from resonance and the pulse duration is much shorter than the lifetime of the excited state of the resonant particles in the medium (atoms in a gas, impurity ions in a solid, etc.), the group velocity of the pulse is appreciably reduced. It is shown that the slowing down of the group velocity of the pulse is accompanied with a pulse chirp, which produces a pulse broadening in time. It is proposed to use two samples in sequence with opposite chirps (up chirp and down chirp or vice versa) compensating the pulse broadening. Then the pulse can be delayed with almost no losses, distortion, and broadening. However, there is a maximum distance, beyond which the pulse experiences corruption. Pumping with an auxiliary laser beam can control the delay time of the light pulse in the medium. Conditions to eliminate the contribution of the dephasing processes in the pulse propagation are considered.