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Optics Letters

Storage and time reversal of light pulses using photon echoes

N. W. Carlson, William Randall Babbitt, THOMAS W. MOSSBERG, Lewis J. Rothberg, Arjun G. Yodh

Published Sep 1, 1983• 102 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We have studied the temporal profile of photon-echo signals generated by combined gated cw and pulsed dye-laser excitation of the inhomogeneously broadened, 555.6-nm absorption line of (174)Yb vapor. We find that the echo profile is, after time reversal, essentially identical with that of the first excitation pulse. We give a new analysis of this effect. Since time-reversed pulse reproduction should also occur in inhomogeneously broadened solid samples, and since we observe time-reversed reproduced pulses up to 4% as intense as the input pulse, this effect may have important applications in optical signal-processing systems.

DOI
10.1364/ol.8.000483

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We have studied the temporal profile of photon-echo signals generated by combined gated cw and pulsed dye-laser excitation of the inhomogeneously broadened, 555.6-nm absorption line of (174)Yb vapor. We find that the echo profile is, after time reversal, essentially identical with that of the first excitation pulse. We give a new analysis of this effect. Since time-reversed pulse reproduction should also occur in inhomogeneously broadened solid samples, and since we observe time-reversed reproduced pulses up to 4% as intense as the input pulse, this effect may have important applications in optical signal-processing systems.
Using an acousto-optically gated cw dye laser and working on the 555.6-nm absorption line of atomic(174)Yb, we have studied the shape of two-excitation-pulse photon echoes as a function of the duration and intensity of the second excitation pulse. Surprisingly, a long and intense second excitation pulse is found to generate an echo having a shape highly correlated with that of the first excitation pulse. This occurs because the high field of pulse 2 effectively stops dephasing processes throughout its duration.
Stimulated photon echoes (three-pulse echoes) produced by broadband (incoherent) light pulses are discussed. A switching time corresponding to the reciprocal inhomogeneous width is predicted for the echo signal when the time interval between the first two time-overlapping, mutually coherent pulses is scanned across 0. The effect is demonstrated in an experiment performed with cesium vapor. A new method for fast sampling of atomic or molecular velocity distribution is proposed with potential applications to photodissociation and photofragmentation studies.
Optical nutation signals are found to be modified in interesting ways by a short, intense, excitation pulse. In particular, pulses of appropriate character are found to effect a time reversal of the optical nutation signal, i.e., the nutation signal after the short pulse evolves as the mirror image of the nutation signal before the pulse. In ideal cases, all dephasing effects resulting from inhomogeneous broadening are reversed, and a nutation echo occurs when all atoms rephase in the excited state. Various excitation conditions that lead to the time reversal of optical nutation signals are considered, and numerical simulations are compared with experimental results. Finally, the rephasing considered here is compared to that observed in the case of rotary echoes.
We study quantum compression and decompression of light pulses that carry quantum information using a photon-echo quantum memory technique with controllable inhomogeneous broadening of an isolated atomic absorption line. We investigate media with differently broadened absorption profiles, transverse and longitudinal, finding that the recall efficiency can be as large as unity and that the quantum information encoded into the photonic qubits can remain unperturbed. Our results provide insight into reversible light-atom interaction and are interesting in view of future quantum communication networks, where pulse compression and decompression may play an important role in increasing the qubit rate or in mapping quantum information from photonic carriers with large optical bandwidth into atomic memories with smaller bandwidth.
Quantum memories based on the photon-echo principle (with controlled reversible inhomogeneous broadening) allow in principle perfect reconstruction of the stored light. In the retrieval process, the envelope of the absorbed wave packet is reversed in time, but the evolution of the phase of the carrier wave is unchanged. We discuss the consequences of this fact for the relative phase of pulses with a certain time delay, and thus for the storage of time-bin qubits. As an illustration, we show that the combination of photon-echo-based memories and unbalanced interferometers leads to a counterintuitive interference effect, allowing one to measure a path length difference $\ensuremath{\Delta}L$ using pulses that are much shorter than $\ensuremath{\Delta}L$.