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Journal of the Optical Society of America B

Investigation of a simplified model of storage and retrieval of light in a thermal atomic system

Min Xie, Tianhui Qiu, Jianyu Meng, Guojian Yang

Published Nov 9, 2009• 2 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We investigate the storage and retrieval of a weak signal light in a thermal Λ type three-level atomic system. We examine in detail the time-dependent aspect of this system in which atomic motion with both internal and translational degrees of freedom is taken into consideration under different conditions of the atomic momentum distributions and the settings of two light fields. We confirm the effectiveness of a Doppler-free copropagating configuration in promoting the efficiency of the system operation.

DOI
10.1364/josab.26.002261

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We investigate the reversible storage of a weak single-mode light signal in a Λ-type three-level atomic system with spontaneously generated coherence (SGC) and pumped by an incoherent field. The scheme is phase-dependent. If the phase of the controlling field is set oppositely to that of the signal field, the combination of SGC with weak pump overcomes the drawback of incompletely retrieval in the conventional scheme, leading to 100% retrieval fidelity or even to the amplification of the retrieved signal with respect to its initial one.
We report an experimental demonstration of slowed propagation and storage and retrieval of thermal light using the effect of electromagnetically-induced transparency (EIT) in the Λ-type system of the D1 transition of 85Rb atom. The slowed-propagation of the probe thermal light beam through an EIT medium is observed by measuring the second-order correlation function of the light field using the Hanbury-Brown-Twiss interferometer. We also demonstrate the storage and retrieval of thermal light beam in the EIT medium. The direct measurement of the photon number statistics of the retrieved light field shows that the photon number statistics is preserved during the storage and retrieval process.
In a recent paper [Gorshkov et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 98, 123601 (2007)], we presented a universal physical picture for describing a wide range of techniques for storage and retrieval of photon wave packets in $\ensuremath{\Lambda}$-type atomic media in free space, including the adiabatic reduction of the photon group velocity, pulse-propagation control via off-resonant Raman techniques, and photon-echo based techniques. This universal picture produced an optimal control strategy for photon storage and retrieval applicable to all approaches and yielded identical maximum efficiencies for all of them. In the present paper, we present the full details of this analysis as well some of its extensions, including the discussion of the effects of non-degeneracy of the two lower levels of the $\ensuremath{\Lambda}$ system. The analysis in the present paper is based on the intuition obtained from the study of photon storage in the cavity model in the preceding paper [Gorshkov et al., previous paper, Phys. Rev. A. 76, 033804 (2007)].
In a Λ-type atomic system with electromagnetically-induced transparency, we probe the fidelity of the storage and retrieval of an electromagnetic signal, as the control laser field is varied with time. We study numerically the adiabatic transfer problem for an isolated atom, and show that for a weak signal, even the slowest variations of the control field take the system out of the dark state, which is a coherent superposition of the two lower levels of the Λ system. Following this, we incorporate the effect of dissipation on system dynamics by allowing for spontaneous decay of the system to the lower levels in a wavefunction approach. We conclude that dissipation definitely aids the retrieval process but not so much the storage. Further, for storing the signal, the control field should be switched off as slowly as possible, but while retrieving it, the faster we switch on the control field, the better the signal is retrieved. Also, for a given system there is an optimal control power for the best retrieval. Our results find partial support in the reported experimental observations.