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Physical Review A

Stationary light pulses in cold thermal atomic clouds

Jin‐Hui Wu, M. Artoni, Giuseppe Carlo La Rocca

Published Jul 12, 2010• 46 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Fourier-expanded Maxwell-Liouville equations are employed to study the light pulse dynamics in atomic samples coherently driven by a standing-wave light field. Solutions are obtained by a suitable truncation of the Maxwell-Liouville equations that contain the number of spin and optical Fourier coherence components appropriate to the sample temperature. This approach is examined here for cold but thermal atoms where the Doppler broadening is still not negligible and familiar secular approximations no longer hold. In this temperature regime higher-order momentum Fourier coherence components are shown to be important for achieving excellent agreement with a recent experiment done in cold $^{87}\mathrm{Rb}$ clouds at several hundred microkelvins.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.82.013807

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Fourier-expanded Maxwell-Liouville equations are employed to study the light pulse dynamics in atomic samples coherently driven by a standing-wave light field. Solutions are obtained by a suitable truncation of the Maxwell-Liouville equations that contain the number of spin and optical Fourier coherence components appropriate to the sample temperature. This approach is examined here for cold but thermal atoms where the Doppler broadening is still not negligible and familiar secular approximations no longer hold. In this temperature regime higher-order momentum Fourier coherence components are shown to be important for achieving excellent agreement with a recent experiment done in cold 87Rb^{87}\mathrm{Rb}87Rb clouds at several hundred microkelvins.
We develop a general scheme for studying the optical response of ultracold atoms driven into a regime of standing-wave electromagnetically induced transparency. We rely on full numerical solutions of the Maxwell-Liouville equations without invoking secular and adiabatic approximations and arbitrary initial state assumptions. These approximations and assumptions can conceal, e.g., significant loss and diffusion responsible for the decay of stationary light pulses in cold atomic samples. The complex decay dynamics of a stationary light pulse is here analyzed in terms of higher-order spin and optical coherences that arise from nonlinear interactions of the stationary light pulse with the two counterpropagating components of a standing-wave driving field. Specific results for stationary light pulses in cold 87Rb^{87}\mathrm{Rb}87Rb atoms have been discussed for temperature regimes where the residual Doppler broadening is negligible.
We discuss stationary light created by a pair of counterpropagating control fields in $\ensuremath{\Lambda}$-type atomic gases with electromagnetically induced transparency for the case of negligible Doppler broadening. In this case, the secular approximation used in the discussion of stationary light in hot vapors is no longer valid. We discuss the quality of the effective light-trapping system and show that in contrast to previous claims it is finite even for vanishing ground-state dephasing. The dynamics of the photon loss is in general nonexponential and can be faster or slower than in hot gases.
We measure the coherent scattering of low-intensity, near-resonant light by a cloud of laser-cooled two-level rubidium atoms with a size comparable to the wavelength of light. We isolate a two-level atomic structure by applying a 300-G magnetic field. We measure both the temporal and the steady-state coherent optical response of the cloud for various detunings of the laser and for atom numbers ranging from 5 to 100. We compare our results to a microscopic coupled-dipole model and to a multimode, paraxial Maxwell-Bloch model. In the low-intensity regime, both models are in excellent agreement, thus validating the Maxwell-Bloch model. Comparing to the data, the models are found in very good agreement for relatively low densities ($n/{k}^{3}\ensuremath{\lesssim}0.1$), while significant deviations start to occur at higher density. This disagreement indicates that light scattering in dense, cold atomic ensembles is still not quantitatively understood, even in pristine experimental conditions.
Analysis on direct transforming the slow light into the stationary light pulse (SLP) is presented. Without the process of turning the slow light into the coherence between the lower levels, the generation of SLP is more efficient. The Maxwell-Liouville equations are employed to study the light pulse dynamics in the samples coherently driven by a bichromatic standing wave. The solution indicates that the forward and backward components of the SLP approach to each other exponentially. Such property is described by introducing a quantity called characteristic length, which appeared to be the ratio of the optical coherence decay rate and the coefficient of the driving term in Maxwell equation. The necessary length for completing the conversion can be estimated as five times the characteristic length. Several materials are analyzed here, including the 87{}^{87}87Rb atoms with different densities, Pr3+{}^{3+}3+-doped yttrium orthosilicate (Pr:YSO), and nitrogen-vacancy color centers in diamond (N-V centers). The values of the characteristic length for the corresponding materials are calculated, as well as the necessary length.
An analytical method based on a two-mode approximation is here developed to study the optical response of a periodically modulated medium of ultracold atoms driven into a regime of standing-wave electromagnetically induced transparency. A systematic comparison with the usual approach based on the coupled Maxwell-Liouville equations shows that our method is very accurate in the frequency region of interest. Our method, in particular, explains in a straightforward manner the formation of a well-developed photonic bandgap in the optical Bloch wave vector dispersion. For ultracold 87Rb atoms nearly perfect reflectivity may be attained and a light pulse whose frequency components are contained within the gap is seen to be reflected with little loss and deformation.