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Physical Review A

All-optical switching in a coupled cavity-atom system

Xiaogang Wei, Jiepeng Zhang, Yifu Zhu

Published Sep 13, 2010• 39 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We report an experimental observation of all-optical switching in a cavity QED system consisting of multiple three-level atoms confined in a cavity mode. A signal light is coupled into the normal mode of the cavity-atom system and its transmission through the cavity is switched on or off by a control laser coupled to the atoms from free space. Our experiment shows that the all-optical switching in the cavity QED system can be performed for the cavity mode tuned on resonance with or off resonance from the atomic transition frequency.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.82.033808

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We report an experimental observation of all-optical switching in a cavity QED system consisting of multiple three-level atoms confined in a cavity mode. A signal light is coupled into the normal mode of the cavity-atom system and its transmission through the cavity is switched on or off by a control laser coupled to the atoms from free space. Our experiment shows that the all-optical switching in the cavity QED system can be performed for the cavity mode tuned on resonance with or off resonance from the atomic transition frequency.
I analyze an all-optical switching scheme in a cavity QED system consisting of multiple three-level atoms confined in a cavity mode. A control laser coupled to the atoms from free space induces quantum interference in the coupled cavity-atom system and performs all optical switching of the cavity-atom polaritons. When the cavity is tuned far away from the atomic resonance, the cavity-atom polariton consists of nearly pure photonic excitation and then the scheme can be used for photon switching at low light intensities.
We propose a scheme of the interaction-free all-optical switching in a multiatom cavity-QED system consisting of three-level atoms confined in a cavity and coupled by a free-space control laser. A signal laser field is coupled into the cavity and its transmission through and reflection from the cavity form two output channels. We show that the free-space control laser induces destructive quantum interference in the excitation of the atom-cavity normal mode, which can be used to switch on or off the output signal light of the reflection and the transmission channels. When the control light is coupled to the atoms, the input signal light is nearly totally reflected and this means that there is no direct coupling of the control light and the signal light through the cavity-confined atoms. We present analytical and numerical calculations that show that this type of the interaction-free all-optical switching in the coupled cavity-atom system can be realized with high switching efficiencies and at low light intensities.
We present a theoretical model of light controlling light in a multi-atom cavity QED system consisting of three-level atoms confined in a cavity and interacting with a control laser from free space. A signal laser is coupled into the cavity and provides two output light channels: the transmitted signal light through the cavity and the reflected signal light from the cavity. We show that with the cavity electromagnetically induced transparency manifested by the free-space control light, the amplitude and the phase of the intra-cavity signal light can be manipulated by the free-space control laser. We analyze the cavity transmitted signal light and the cavity reflected signal light, and show that the two output channels of the signal light are complementary and the cavity-atom system is a versatile system for studies of all-optical switching and cross-phase modulation at low control intensities.
We propose a scheme of interaction-free bidirectional multi-channel all-optical switching in a multi-level coupling system consisting of four-level atoms confined in a cavity and coupled by a free-space control laser. A signal laser field is coupled into the cavity and excites two separate transitions of atoms simultaneously under the collective strong coupling condition. The transmission and reflection of signal fields form bidirectional output channels. A free-space control laser induces destructive quantum interference in the multi-level excitation of an atom-cavity system, which can be used to switch on/off the output signal lights of transmission/reflection channels. There is no direct coupling of control light and signal light through the cavity-confined atoms because the output of signal light is nearly totally suppressed to the opposite direction when control light is present. The proposed all-optical switching scheme can be realized with high switching efficiency, broad bandwidth, and weak light intensity. It may be useful for future devices of optical routing, optical communications, and various quantum logic elements.
Cavity-enhanced optical controlling is experimentally observed with a low-control laser power in a cavity-atom ensemble system. Here, the three-level atoms are coupled with two optical modes of a Fabry-Perot cavity, where a new theoretical model is developed to describe the effective three-wave mixing process between spin-wave and optical modes. By adjusting either temperature or cavity length, we demonstrate the precise frequency tuning of the hybrid optical-atomic resonances. When the doubly-resonant condition is satisfied, the probe laser can be easily modulated by a control laser. In addition, interesting non-Hermitian physics are predicted theoretically and demonstrated experimentally, and all-optical switching is also achieved. Such a doubly-resonant cavity-atom ensemble system without a specially designed cavity can be used for future applications, such as optical signal storage and microwave-to-optical frequency conversion.
We propose an all-optical switch constructed from a two-mode optical resonator containing a strongly coupled, three-state system. The coupling allows a weak, continuous wave laser drive to incoherently control the transmission of a much stronger, continuous wave signal laser into (and through) the resonator. We demonstrate that in this simple setup the presence of a control drive with 1/10th\text{th}th the power of the signal drive can induce near complete reflection of the signal, while its absence allows for near complete transmission. The switch can also be operated as a set-reset relay with two control inputs that efficiently drive the switch into either the reflecting or the transmitting state.