Physical Review A

Few-cycle self-induced-transparency solitons

Yuan-Yao Lin, I-Hong Chen, Ray‐Kuang Lee

Published Apr 21, 2011• 16 citations

Abstract

We reveal the existence of an optical self-induced-transparency soliton family in a two-level absorbing system down to the few-cycle limit. Based on the few-cycle envelope approximation, we introduce a systematical method of reducing the Maxwell-Bloch equations beyond the slowly varying envelope approximation and characterize the parameter space to achieve slow and fast lights. Verified by direct numerical simulations with full vectorial Maxwell-Bloch equations, we also give the relationships for a number of optical cycles on area theory and pulse group velocity, which demonstrate possible coherent photon-matter interactions.

DOI: 10.1103/physreva.83.043828

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