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Physical Review Letters

All Optical Waveguiding in a Coherent Atomic Rubidium Vapor

Praveen K. Vudyasetu, David J. Starling, John C. Howell

Published Mar 26, 2009• 33 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We demonstrate an all optical waveguide imprinted by a low power Laguerre Gaussian control laser beam using a coherent Raman process in warm atomic rubidium vapor. We show that the signal beam propagates with a small spot size over several diffraction lengths. We also show that the coupling efficiency of the signal beam into the waveguide varies linearly with the signal power.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.102.123602

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We demonstrate an all optical waveguide imprinted by a low power Laguerre Gaussian control laser beam using a coherent Raman process in warm atomic rubidium vapor. We show that the signal beam propagates with a small spot size over several diffraction lengths. We also show that the coupling efficiency of the signal beam into the waveguide varies linearly with the signal power.
We present a scheme to create an all-optical tunable and lossless waveguide using a controllable coherent Raman process in an atomic rubidium vapor in an N\mathcal{N}N-type configuration. We employ a Gaussian Raman field and a Laguerre-Gaussian control field to imprint a high-contrast tunable waveguidelike feature inside the atomic medium. We numerically demonstrate that such a waveguide is able to guide arbitrary modes of a weak probe beam to several Rayleigh lengths without diffraction and absorption. Our results on an all-optical waveguide-based scheme may have potential applications in lossless image processing, high-contrast biomedical imaging, and image metrology.
Diffractionless propagation of optical beams through atomic vapors is investigated. The atoms in the vapor are operated in a three-level Raman configuration. A suitably chosen control beam couples to one of the transitions, and thereby creates a spatially varying index of refraction modulation in the warm atomic vapor for a probe beam that couples to the other transition in the atoms. We show that a Laguerre-Gaussian control beam allows the propagation of single Gaussian probe field modes as well as multi-Gaussian modes and non-Gaussian modes over macroscopic distances without diffraction. This opens perspectives for the propagation of arbitrary images through warm atomic vapors.
This thesis presents the applications of some of the coherent processes in a three-level atomic system, to control spatial and temporal properties of a signal pulse. We use two Raman absorption resonances in rubidium vapor separated by a few MHz to achieve a rapidly tunable slow-light system. We control the slow-light characteristics all-optically by tuning the frequency and power of a coupling beam. A dual absorption slow-light system is known to cause less pulse broadening than a single transmission resonance system, and thus, a tunable double absorption system is advantageous. We use a four-wave mixing process to demonstrate pulse storage in rubidium vapor for times much greater than the pulse width. We demonstrate storage of both the temporal and spatial profile of the pulse. We overcome the diffusion of spatial information during the storage in warm atomic vapor by storing the Fourier transform of the image instead of an image with a flat phase. The Raman absorption resonance is also used to control the transverse refractive index profile of the signal beam. The refractive index of the signal interacting with a coupling beam in a Raman process is dependent on the coupling beam intensity. We use a first order Laguerre-Gaussian (LG01) coupling beam to create a waveguide like transverse refractive index profile. We demonstrate propagation of a focused signal beam for lengths much greater than the Rayleigh length. Finally, we demonstrate a dual absorption atomic prism, which is capable
Beam propagation beyond the paraxial approximation is studied in an optically written waveguide structure. The waveguide structure, which leads to diffractionless light propagation, is imprinted on a medium consisting of a five-level atomic vapor driven by an incoherent pump and two coherent spatially dependent control and plane-wave fields. We first study beam propagation in a single optically written waveguide and find that the paraxial approximation does not provide an accurate description of the probe propagation. We then employ coherent control fields such that two parallel and one tilted Gaussian beams produce a branched waveguide structure. The tilted beam allows selective steering of the probe beam into different branches of the waveguide structure. The transmission of the probe beam for a particular branch can be improved by changing the width of the titled Gaussian control beam as well as the intensity of the spatially dependent incoherent pump field.
We report on an all-optical switch that operates at low light levels. It consists of laser beams counterpropagating through a warm rubidium vapor that induce an off-axis optical pattern. A switching laser beam causes this pattern to rotate even when the power in the switching beam is much lower than the power in the pattern. The observed switching energy density is very low, suggesting that the switch might operate at the single-photon level with system optimization. This approach opens the possibility of realizing a single-photon switch for quantum information networks and for improving transparent optical telecommunication networks.
We propose an efficient scheme for the generation of tunable optical waveguides based on atomic vapor in an NNN-type configuration. We exploit both control-field-induced transparency and Kerr-field-induced absorption to produce a flexible probe transparency window otherwise not feasible. We employ a suitable spatial profile of control and Kerr beams to create a high contrast refractive index modulation that holds the key to guiding a weak narrow probe beam. Further, we numerically demonstrate that high-contrast tunable waveguide permits the propagation of different modes of probe beam to several Rayleigh lengths without diffraction. This efficient guiding of narrow optical beam may have important applications in large-density image processing and high-resolution imaging.