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Optics Letters

Experimental studies of photon-echo pulse compression

Yu Bai, THOMAS W. MOSSBERG

Published Jan 1, 1986• 26 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Photon echoes generated by long (i.e., 400–800-nsec) frequency-chirped optical pulses are found to possess (after compensating for avoidable material relaxation) up to 25% of the energy of the first excitation pulse and to have a duration determined by the total chirp bandwidth of the excitation pulses. In our experiment, echoes 30 times shorter than the first excitation pulse were observed.

DOI
10.1364/ol.11.000030

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Photon echoes generated by long (i.e., 400–800-nsec) frequency-chirped optical pulses are found to possess (after compensating for avoidable material relaxation) up to 25% of the energy of the first excitation pulse and to have a duration determined by the total chirp bandwidth of the excitation pulses. In our experiment, echoes 30 times shorter than the first excitation pulse were observed.
It is predicted that linearly chirped optical excitation pulses give rise to photon echoes whose shortness is limited only by the total material bandwidth that contributes to the echo signal. The photon echo process acts as a frequency-dependent optical delay line whose dispersion is determined by the chirp rate of the excitation pulses rather than by their bandwidth. Consequently, long and short pulses can be compressed with equal facility without complicated alignment procedure. Accumulated echoes have similar properties and can be used with trains of weak excitation pulses.
Single pulse compression and multi-bit pulse compression using the photon echo process was investigated.A single pulse could be compressed by a factor of 454 from 10 microseconds to 22 nanoseconds.A 1 O-bits pulse train was compressed by a factor of 92 from 20 microseconds in total length to 212 nanoseconds.The compression factors obtained during this work were an order of magnitude better than those published previously both for single pulse and multi-bit pulse train compression.Observation of the side-band under the envelope of the photon echo signal in multi-bit pulse compression indicates that the bit information is retained in the compression.Some improvements were achieved by optimising the experimental setup during the work.The experimental results were discussed theoretically and were good in agreement with theoretical calculations.The space-time duality of photon echo compression was also analysed in this thesis.The storage material used in the experiment is a Y AG crystal doped with the trivalent rare earth thulium ion with a concentration at 0.1-at.%.The crystal was kept at 4K during the experiment.The absorption, an important characteristic of the crystal was initially measured.The maximum absorption was about 40%, in the range between 7931.50A and 7931.60A with a full width ofhalfmaximum of3.5 A, which corresponds to 19 GHz.A homemade external cavity diode laser equipped with an intra-high coherency and ultrahigh-speed frequency chirping properties was used in the experiments.This system with an intra-cavity electro-optic crystal (EOC) was employed for the optical data compression because of its advantages of simplicity, high quantum efficiency, low cost, and compact size, which is necessary for practical applications in the future.Some critical properties for this laser were investigated.The laser line-width was measured to be 350 KHz over a 200 microseconds duration using the spectral hole burning method and a voltage-chirping rate of about 7 MHz/V was determined by calculations and experimental measurements.
The role of weakly chirped pulses (time bandwidth product, DeltanuDeltatau<0.61) on three-pulse photon echo signals has been systematically studied. Pulses with varying chirp were characterized with frequency resolved optical gating (FROG) and used to measure spectrally resolved three-pulse photon echoes of a dye in solution. The weakly chirped pulses give rise to markedly different echo signals for population times below approximately 100 fs. The chirped pulses can decrease or enhance spectral signatures of an excited state absorption transition in the echo signal. Furthermore, the observed dephasing dynamics depend on the phase of the electric fields. Simulations based on a three-level model and the electric fields retrieved from the FROG traces give a good agreement for photon echo experiments with both transform limited and chirped pulses. The simulations also allow for a numerical investigation of effects of chirp in two-dimensional spectroscopy. For a two-level system, the chirped pulses result in nonelliptical two-dimensional spectra that can erroneously be interpreted as spectral heterogeneity with frequency dependent dephasing dynamics. Furthermore, chirped pulses can give rise to "false" cross peaks when strong vibrational modes are involved in the system-bath interaction.
We have studied the effect of generative-pulse amplitude, spatial profile, and temporal character as well as medium optical thickness on the power of photon and stimulated echoes. Working in atomic Yb vapor, photon echoes are observed that, absent material relaxation, are more powerful than the first generative pulse, thereby exceeding typically expected photon-echo powers by approximately two orders of magnitude. Factors crucial to the generation of powerful echoes identified through Maxwell-Bloch simulation are experimentally confirmed.