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arXiv:1811.09049 · Annalen der Physik

Different Regimes of Ultrashort Pulse Propagation in Disordered Layered Media with Resonant Loss and Gain

Denis V. Novitsky, Dmitrii N. Redka, Alexander S. Shalin

Published Jul 11, 2019• 2 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Abstract Different optical nanostructures containing both loss and gain components attract ever‐increasing attention as novel advanced materials and building blocks for a variety of nanophotonic and plasmonic applications. Unique tunable optical signatures of the so‐called active metamaterials support their utilization for sensing, imaging, and signal processing on micro‐ and nanoscales. However, this tunability requires flexible control over the metamaterial parameters, which could be provided by involving a set of nonlinear interactions. In this paper, a method of governing ultrashort pulses is proposed by varying the level of a population difference disorder in a random active metamaterial. This enables us to deliver three different interaction regimes: self‐induced transparency (low disorder), localization regime (moderate disorder), and light amplification (strong disorder) corresponding to strongly different light pulse speeds. Since this control could be realized via rather plain tools, like simple pump tuning, the proposed disordered medium opens a room of opportunities for designing a peculiar active component for a whole set of highly demanded optical applications.

DOI
10.1002/andp.201900080

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Abstract Different optical nanostructures containing both loss and gain components attract ever‐increasing attention as novel advanced materials and building blocks for a variety of nanophotonic and plasmonic applications. Unique tunable optical signatures of the so‐called active metamaterials support their utilization for sensing, imaging, and signal processing on micro‐ and nanoscales. However, this tunability requires flexible control over the metamaterial parameters, which could be provided by involving a set of nonlinear interactions. In this paper, a method of governing ultrashort pulses is proposed by varying the level of a population difference disorder in a random active metamaterial. This enables us to deliver three different interaction regimes: self‐induced transparency (low disorder), localization regime (moderate disorder), and light amplification (strong disorder) corresponding to strongly different light pulse speeds. Since this control could be realized via rather plain tools, like simple pump tuning, the proposed disordered medium opens a room of opportunities for designing a peculiar active component for a whole set of highly demanded optical applications.
Abstract Random resonant media being one of the possible realizations of disordered metamaterials open a room of opportunities for achieving new fundamental effects and designing advanced nanophotonic devices. Strongly nonlinear optical properties of such media attract ever increasing attention nowadays from both theoretical and experimental points of view. Hereinafter, the case of the photonic‐crystal‐like structure with a randomly varying light–matter coupling provided by the random density of quantum particles is considered. Using numerical solution of the Maxwell–Bloch equations, the effects of the pulse collisions in the medium are studied. It is shown that disorder enables the qualitative changes of the system's response for co‐propagating pulses, whereas this is not the case for the counter‐propagating ones. The scheme for an all‐optical transmission modulation due to the disorder‐induced inelasticity of collisions of co‐propagating pulses is proposed. The ability of precise tuning the modulation via the inter‐pulse distance and background refractive index adjustment is revealed. This novel approach for light control can be utilized for some high demand applications, such as modulation and switching of a pulsed radiation.
The study of optical effects in active media is rich with unexpected consequences. For instance, one may imagine that absorption and amplification in a dielectric medium will exhibit some sort of symmetry because both are related to the same imaginary part of the dielectric constant, except for a sign change. It turns out that such a symmetry does not exist [1]. This issue has also been investigated in detail for random or disordered gain media, with varying viewpoints [2]. Traditionally, much of the research on amplifying media has considered the interaction of light within the entire volume of such a medium. Recent interest in metamaterials and other esoteric structures in which plasmons are used to manipulate optical signals has brought attention to the role of surface waves in active dielectrics [3, 4]. From a fundamental perspective, the main difference between active and passive media is that spontaneous emission cannot be avoided in gain media. As a result, a rigorous analysis of gain media demands a quantum-mechanical treatment. Spontaneous emission in a gain medium depends not only on the material properties of that medium but also on the optical modes supported by the structure containing that material [5]. By a clever design of this structure (e.g., photonic crystals or microdisk resonators with a metallic cladding), it is possible to control the local density of optical modes and the spontaneous emission process itself. In Chapter 4, we discuss how to model a gain medium under such conditions by deploying optical Bloch equations.
We propose a concept of disordered resonant media, which are characterized by random variations of their parameters along the light propagation direction. In particular, a simple model of disorder considered in the paper implies random change of the density of active particles (two-level atoms). Within this model, the effect of disorder on self-induced transparency (SIT) is analyzed using numerical simulations of light pulse propagation through the medium. The transition from the SIT to localization regime is revealed as well as its dependence on the disorder level, atom density, medium thickness, and period of random variations.
Control over the time dependence of the refractive index of a material allows one to modify and manipulate the properties of light propagating through it. While metamaterials provide a promising avenue in this context, another route has been extensively explored by the ultrafast community - the so-called molecular modulators. Indeed, impulsively-aligned diatomic molecules provide a unique medium, where periodic rotational revivals induced by a pump pulse persist for tens of picoseconds, offering an excellent opportunity for the controlled modification of the refractive index and, therefore, of femtosecond laser pulses propagating through these media. Here we present an analytical theory which describes this process and stumble across a novel mechanism revealing exponential transformations of the probe pulse - its compression, amplification and frequency up-conversion. In particular, our analytical results predict the generation of amplified ultrashort (about 20 fs) ultraviolet pulses centered around 550 nm, starting with near infrared input pulses centered on 1 μm of about 30 fs duration, under very realistic experimental conditions.
We illustrate a mechanism based on coherent optical nonlinearities to realize optically tunable photonic crystals built from media supporting electromagnetically induced transparency. These exhibit specific periodic patterns where a light probe can experience a fully developed photonic band-gap with negligible absorption. An analytical method based on a two-mode approximation is developed to study the optical response of such a periodically modulated medium driven into a regime of standing-wave electromagnetically induced transparency. A comparison with a transfer matrix approach and with techniques based on the coupled Maxwell–Liouville equations shows that our method is very accurate to describe the optical properties of such photonic metamaterials in the frequency region of interest. Nearly perfect reflectivities may be attained for ultracold 87Rb atoms samples which are seen to reflect with little loss and deformation light pulses whose frequency components are contained within the gap. When the same mechanism is implemented for inhomogeneously broadened optical transitions of nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond, which is more amenable to device applications, fully developed photonic band-gap structures with negligible absorption, reflectivities very close to unity and sufficiently large bandwidths may also be attained. We further examine more flexible schemes based on four level systems under double driving conditions showing more accurate and efficient coherent optical control of the photonic band-gap. The remarkable experimental simplicity of the schemes that we presented is set to ease quantum nonlinear optics applications.