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Physical Review Letters

All-Optical Light Confinement in Dynamic Cavities in Cold Atoms

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

Published Sep 24, 2009• 40 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We show how to realize in a cold atomic sample a dynamic magneto-optically controlled cavity in which a slow-light pulse can be confined and released on demand. The probe optical pulse is retrieved from the atomic spin coherence initially stored within the cavity and is subsequently confined there subject to a slow-light regime with little loss and diffusion for time intervals as long as a few hundred microseconds before being extracted from either side of the cavity. Our proof-of-principle scheme illustrates the underlying physics of this new mechanism for coherent light confinement and manipulation in cold atoms. This may ease the realization of nonlinear interactions between weak light pulses where strong atom-photon interactions are required for quantum information processing.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.103.133601

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We show how to realize in a cold atomic sample a dynamic magneto-optically controlled cavity in which a slow-light pulse can be confined and released on demand. The probe optical pulse is retrieved from the atomic spin coherence initially stored within the cavity and is subsequently confined there subject to a slow-light regime with little loss and diffusion for time intervals as long as a few hundred microseconds before being extracted from either side of the cavity. Our proof-of-principle scheme illustrates the underlying physics of this new mechanism for coherent light confinement and manipulation in cold atoms. This may ease the realization of nonlinear interactions between weak light pulses where strong atom-photon interactions are required for quantum information processing.
By applying a traveling-wave coupling field,a standing-wave grating field,and a static magnetic field to a cold atomic ensemble,a dynamically controlled cavity consisting of two Bragg regions of high reflection and an electromagnetically induced transparency region with high transmission is realized.With modulating all the three fields in time,a weak probe pulse is sent into the coherently induced optical cavity to achieve several periodic oscillations and then it is retrieved after a short time.This physical phenomenon is accompanied with little energy loss and can be regarded as an efficient scheme for dynamic light storage.This paper simulates the dynamic light storage scheme,discusses numerically its advantages and presents the developing trend of the scheme.
We demonstrate a coherent and dynamic beam splitter based on light storage in cold atoms. An input weak laser pulse is first stored in a cold atom ensemble via electromagnetically-induced transparency (EIT). A set of counter-propagating control fields, applied at a later time, retrieves the stored pulse into two output spatial modes. The high visibility interference between the two output pulses clearly demonstrates that the beam splitting process is coherent. Furthermore, by manipulating the control lasers, it is possible to dynamically control the storage time, the power splitting ratio, the relative phase, and the optical frequencies of the output pulses. With further improvements, the active beam splitter demonstrated in this work might have applications in photonic photonic quantum information and in all-optical information processing.
We report the experimental observation of slow-light and coherent storage in a setting where light is tightly confined in the transverse directions. By interfacing a tapered optical nanofiber with a cold atomic ensemble, electromagnetically induced transparency is observed and light pulses at the single-photon level are stored in and retrieved from the atomic medium. The decay of efficiency with storage time is also measured and related to concurrent decoherence mechanisms. Collapses and revivals can be additionally controlled by an applied magnetic field. Our results based on subdiffraction-limited optical mode interacting with atoms via the strong evanescent field demonstrate an alternative to free-space focusing and a novel capability for information storage in an all-fibered quantum network.
Tapered optical fibers with a nanofiber waist are versatile tools for interfacing light and matter. In this context, laser-cooled atoms trapped in the evanescent field surrounding the optical nanofiber are of particular interest: They exhibit both long ground-state coherence times and efficient coupling to fiber-guided fields. Here, we demonstrate electromagnetically induced transparency, slow light, and the storage of fiber-guided optical pulses in an ensemble of cold atoms trapped in a nanofiber-based optical lattice. We measure a slow-down of light pulses to group velocities of 50 m/s. Moreover, we store optical pulses at the single photon level and retrieve them on demand in the fiber after 2 microseconds with an overall efficiency of (3.0 +/- 0.4) %. Our results show that nanofiber-based interfaces for cold atoms have great potential for the realization of building blocks for future optical quantum information networks.
We theoretically explore coherent information transfer between ultraslow light pulses and Bose-Einstein condensates (BEC's) and find that storing light pulses in BEC's allows the coherent condensate dynamics to process optical information. We consider BEC's of alkali atoms with a $\ensuremath{\Lambda}$ energy level configuration. In this configuration, one laser (the coupling field) can cause a pulse of a second pulsed laser (the probe field) to propagate with little attenuation (electromagnetically induced transparency) at a very slow group velocity $(\ensuremath{\sim}10\phantom{\rule{0.3em}{0ex}}\mathrm{m}∕\mathrm{s})$ and be spatially compressed to lengths smaller than the BEC. These pulses can be fully stopped and later revived by switching the coupling field off and on. Here we develop a formalism, applicable in both the weak- and strong-probe regimes, to analyze such experiments and establish several results: (1) We show that the switching can be performed on time scales much faster than the adiabatic time scale for electromagnetically induced transparancy even in the strong-probe regime. We also study the behavior of the system changes when this time scale is faster than the excited state lifetime. (2) Stopped light pulses write their phase and amplitude information onto spatially dependent atomic wave functions, resulting in coherent two-component BEC dynamics during long storage times. We investigate examples relevant to 87Rb^{87}\mathrm{Rb}87Rb experimental parameters and see a variety of novel dynamics occur, including interference fringes, gentle breathing excitations, and two-component solitons, depending on the relative scattering lengths of the atomic states used and the probe to coupling intensity ratio. We find that the dynamics when the levels $\ensuremath{\mid}F=1,{M}_{F}=\ensuremath{-}1⟩$ and $\ensuremath{\mid}F=2,{M}_{F}=+1⟩$ are used could be well suited to designing controlled processing of the information input on the probe. (3) Switching the coupling field on after the dynamics writes the evolved BEC wave functions density and phase features onto a revived probe pulse, which then propagates out. We establish equations linking the BEC wave function to the resulting output probe pulses in both the strong- and weak-probe regimes. We then identify sources of deviations from these equations due to absorption and distortion of the pulses. These deviations result in imperfect fidelity of the information transfer from the atoms to the light fields and we calculate this fidelity for Gaussian-shaped features in the BEC wave functions. In the weak-probe case, we find that the fidelity is affected both by absorption of very-small-length-scale features and absorption of features occupying regions near the condensate edge. We discuss how to optimize the fidelity using these considerations. In the strong-probe case, we find that when the oscillator strengths for the two transitions are equal the fidelity is not strongly sensitive to the probe strength, while when they are unequal the fidelity is worse for stronger probes. Applications to distant communication between BEC's, squeezed light generation, and quantum information are anticipated.
We report on our experiments on nonlinear magneto-optical effects in laser-cooled, near-degenerate rubidium samples. Atoms are laser-cooled and subsequently transferred to the crossed-beam optical dipole trap (ODT), formed by a tight focusing of 1560-nm laser beams. The trap not only provides long relaxation time but also allows us to investigate the quantum degeneracy regime. Moreover, the tight confinement of atoms enables magnetic field probing with a high spatial resolution of a few tens of micrometers.