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Physical Review Letters

Direct Observation of Optical Precursors in a Region of Anomalous Dispersion

Heejeong Jeong, Andrew M. C. Dawes, Daniel J. Gauthier

Published Apr 12, 2006• 113 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We create optical precursors by propagating a step-modulated optical pulse through a linear resonant dielectric absorber. The field emerging from the dielectric consists of a several-nanosecond-long spike with near 100% transmission, which decays to a constant value expected from Beer's law. This high-transmission spike might be useful for imaging applications requiring penetrating optical radiation. We compare our observations to two different theories, revealing that the spike consists of both the Sommerfeld and Brillouin precursors.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.96.143901

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We create optical precursors by propagating a step-modulated optical pulse through a linear resonant dielectric absorber. The field emerging from the dielectric consists of a several-nanosecond-long spike with near 100% transmission, which decays to a constant value expected from Beer's law. This high-transmission spike might be useful for imaging applications requiring penetrating optical radiation. We compare our observations to two different theories, revealing that the spike consists of both the Sommerfeld and Brillouin precursors.
We observe interference between the optical precursors and the main signal for small optical depth α0 L ∼ 1, in which the main signal cannot be entirely absorbed. Since the main signal oscillates at the carrier frequency of the input pulse and precursors oscillate at medium resonance frequency, in our case carrier frequency dependence of the total transmitted field is observed as a form of modulation patterns oscillating at the detuning frequency. To distinguish between the Sommerfeld and Brillouin precursors for the case of weakly dispersive off-resonance medium, we utilize asymptotic precursor theory under the assumption of small detuning.