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Physical Review A

Slow light by coherent hole burnings

Qiongyi He, Bing Zhang, Xiaogang Wei, Jin‐Hui Wu, Shang-qi Kuang, Jin-Yue Gao

Published Jun 18, 2008• 4 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We show that the simultaneous application of a copropagating saturating pump and a counterpropagating coherent beam can be used to burn a narrow spectral hole within the absorption line of the optical transition in a Doppler-broadened medium. The large index of refraction of this hole slows down a light pulse by a factor of about ${10}^{4}$. In addition, we propose a method to create two-color slow light pulses with simultaneous gain by employing a bichromatic field to saturate the medium.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.77.063827

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We show that the simultaneous application of a copropagating saturating pump and a counterpropagating coherent beam can be used to burn a narrow spectral hole within the absorption line of the optical transition in a Doppler-broadened medium. The large index of refraction of this hole slows down a light pulse by a factor of about 104{10}^{4}104. In addition, we propose a method to create two-color slow light pulses with simultaneous gain by employing a bichromatic field to saturate the medium.
We show theoretically that the propagation of light can be slowed down considerably using the method of coherent hole-burning in a Doppler broadened three-level lambda-type atomic medium without the Doppler-free configurations. The reduction of group velocity of light pulse is achieved by the application of a saturating beam and a strong coupling beam which produce a narrow spectral hole-burning at resonance. We can obtain a larger group index than that using the method of saturation absorption spectroscopy in Doppler-broadened two-level atomic systems.
The paper presents a critical analysis of publications on one of the methods of creating so-called slow light (light with an anomalously low group velocity) arising due to a high steepness of the refractive index dispersion curve. The method employs, for this purpose, the effect of coherent population oscillations accompanied by burning of a narrow spectral hole in the homogeneously broadened absorption spectrum. The interpretation of the experimental data in the studies under consideration is based on the analysis of the response of a nonlinear medium to a low-frequency intensity modulation of the propagating light beam. We show that all the observations of these papers can be easily interpreted in the framework of the simplest model of a saturable absorber and have nothing to do with the hole burning effect or group velocity reduction.
We consider the propagation of a Gaussian probe pulse in an absorptive, optically dense, two-level medium if a deep, persistent hole is created in advance by another pump field in the inhomogeneously broadened absorption spectrum of this medium. Both fields are well separated in time and the lifetime of the hole is assumed to be long with respect to the delay time between the pump and probe pulses. We show that the group velocity of the Gaussian probe pulse reduces several orders in magnitude, similarly to the reduction of the group velocity for the probe field in electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) phenomena. In contrast to EIT, the width of the transparency window can be made very wide because of the saturation broadening of the hole.
We show that the propagation of light in a Doppler-broadened medium can be slowed down considerably even though such medium exhibits very flat dispersion. The slowing down is achieved by the application of a saturating counter propagating beam that produces a hole in the inhomogeneous line shape. In atomic vapors, we calculate group indices of the order of 103.{10}^{3}.103. The calculations include all coherence effects.
Five coherent hole-burning can be simultaneously observed in the absorption spectra of four-level N-style atoms vapors. In this system they adopt a saturated laser co-propagates and two coupling lasers counter-propagate with a probe laser, and the saturated laser can not be in the destructive Doppler state with the probe light. The positions of the coherent hole-burning can be explained by Dressed-state theory. The middle narrow deep hole-burning is induced by the superposition of two coherent hole-burnings. The depth of the coherent hole-burning can be changed by adjusting the reference parameters and the Rabi frequency of the saturated laser. The positions of the coherent hole-burning can be changed by modulating the Rabi frequency of the probe light. By numerical simulation it is found that Rabi frequency of the saturated light plays an important role in slowing the propagating speed. These results may be useful in optical quantum memory and optical quantum information.