Quantum Effects in Light Propagation through a Nonlinear Medium

Izo I. Abram, E. Cohen

Antonín Luk¿, Vlasta Peřinová

Hazrat Ali, Ziauddin Ziauddin, Iftikhar Ahmad

The influence of Kerr nonlinearity and Doppler broadening on the slow light propagation of a dispersive atomic medium is revisited using a four-level ?-type (87Rb) atomic system under the condition of electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT). The medium exhibits an EIT process which is accompanied by normal dispersion, i.e.,?sub-luminal (slow light) pulse propagation. In the presence of Kerr nonlinearity and the Doppler broadening effect the dispersion property of the proposed atomic medium is modified, which leads to enhancement of the positive group index of the medium. The combined effect of Kerr nonlinearity and Doppler broadening on slow light propagation inside the medium is the major motivation for this work.

Holger Schmidt

B. Hüttner, Sergio D. Serulnik, Y. Ben-Aryeh

We develop a quantization procedure for treating the propagation of light. This formalism is particularly effective in a dispersive nonlinear medium characterized by its macroscopic linear and nonlinear polarizability. We demonstrate it by analyzing the propagation of light in a multimode degenerate parametric amplifier.

Izo I. Abram, E. Cohen

Starting with the canonical quantization procedure for the electromagnetic field inside an effective (linear or nonlinear) medium, we present a direct-space formulation of the theory of quantum optics. This approach does not use the conventional modal decomposition of the field, but relies on the electromagnetic momentum operator defined in terms of local electric- and magnetic-field operators. The momentum operator contains all the information on the spatial characteristics of the field, and can describe the translation of a short light pulse in a nonlinear medium, without a modal analysis of the pulse. Propagation is described through an operatorial wave equation that relates the temporal evolution of an electromagnetic pulse to its spatial progression. Through this equation, the direct-space approach to quantum optics can treat traveling-wave nonlinear-optical phenomena and, at the same time, account for their quantum statistics. The theory is applied to squeezed-light generation by the parametric down-conversion of a short laser pulse, as an illustration.