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Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE

Experimental demonstration of spinor slow light

Meng‐Jung Lee, Julius Ruseckas, Chin-Yuan Lee, Viačeslav Kudriašov, Kao-Fang Chang, Hung-Wen Cho, Gediminas Juzeliūnas, Ite A. Yu

Published Mar 7, 2016• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Over the last decade there has been a continuing interest in slow and stored light based on the electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) effect, because of their potential applications in quantum information manipulation. However, previous experimental works all dealt with the single-component slow light which cannot be employed as a qubit. In this work, we report the first experimental demonstration of two-component or spinor slow light (SSL) using a double tripod (DT) atom-light coupling scheme. The oscillations between the two components, similar to the Rabi oscillation of a two-level system or a qubit, were observed. Single-photon SSL can be considered as two-color qubits. We experimentally demonstrated a possible application of the DT scheme as quantum memory and quantum rotator for the two-color qubits. This work opens up a new direction in the slow light research.

DOI
10.1117/12.2220197

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Over the last decade there has been a continuing interest in slow and stored light based on the electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) effect, because of their potential applications in quantum information manipulation. However, previous experimental works all dealt with the single-component slow light which cannot be employed as a qubit. In this work, we report the first experimental demonstration of two-component or spinor slow light (SSL) using a double tripod (DT) atom-light coupling scheme. The oscillations between the two components, similar to the Rabi oscillation of a two-level system or a qubit, were observed. Single-photon SSL can be considered as two-color qubits. We experimentally demonstrated a possible application of the DT scheme as quantum memory and quantum rotator for the two-color qubits. This work opens up a new direction in the slow light research.
Slow light based on the effect of electromagnetically induced transparency is of great interest due to its applications in low-light-level nonlinear optics and quantum information manipulation. The previous experiments all dealt with the single-component slow light. Here, we report the experimental demonstration of two-component or spinor slow light using a double-tripod atom-light coupling scheme. The scheme involves three atomic ground states coupled to two excited states by six light fields. The oscillation due to the interaction between the two components was observed. On the basis of the stored light, our data showed that the double-tripod scheme behaves like the two outcomes of an interferometer enabling precision measurements of frequency detuning. We experimentally demonstrated a possible application of the double-tripod scheme as quantum memory/rotator for the two-colour qubit. Our study also suggests that the spinor slow light is a better method than a widely used scheme in the nonlinear frequency conversion.
We investigate quantum nonlinear effects at a level of individual quanta in a double-tripod atom-light coupling scheme involving two atomic Rydberg states. In such a scheme the slow light coherently coupled to strongly interacting Rydberg states represents a two-component or spinor light. The scheme provides additional possibilities for the control and manipulation of light quanta. A distinctive feature of the proposed setup is that it combines the spin-orbit coupling for the spinor slow light with an interaction between the photons, enabling generation of the second probe beam even when two-photon detuning is zero. Furthermore, the interaction between the photons can become repulsive if the one-photon detunings have opposite signs. This is different from a single-ladder atom-light coupling scheme in which the interaction between the photons is attractive for both positive and negative detunings as long as the Rabi frequency of the control beam is not too high.
We consider two-component ``spinor'' slow light in an ensemble of atoms coherently driven by two pairs of counterpropagating control laser fields in a double tripod-type linkage scheme. We derive an equation of motion for the spinor slow light (SSL) representing an effective Dirac equation for a massive particle with the mass determined by the two-photon detuning. By changing the detuning the atomic medium acts as a photonic crystal with a controllable band gap. If the frequency of the incident probe light lies within the band gap, the light experiences reflection from the sample and can tunnel through it. For frequencies outside the band gap, the transmission and reflection probabilities oscillate with the increasing length of the sample. In both cases the reflection takes place into the complementary mode of the probe field. We investigate the influence of the finite excited state lifetime on the transmission and reflection coefficients of the probe light. We discuss possible experimental implementations of the SSL using alkali-metal atoms such as rubidium or sodium.
We present a theoretical investigation on the quantum memory of photonic polarization qubits via electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT). The system we consider is a tripod-shaped four-level atomic system working under the condition of a double EIT, by which the storage and retrieval of a single-photon polarization qubit are implemented through the switching off and on of a control laser field, and the storage efficiency and the quantum-state fidelity for qubit memory are both calculated. We show that the optimal optical depth for acquiring the maximum efficiency and maximum fidelity of the qubit memory can be obtained simultaneously, which can be further improved by suppressing the optical absorption and dispersion via the choice of the time duration of the input qubit pulse and the amplitude of the control field. We also carry out a calculation on the quantum memory of a single-photon qudit by considering a multipod-shaped atomic-level configuration. The results reported here are useful for understanding the quantum transmission property of slow lights with multiple components and helpful for experimental realizations of high-quality memory of photonic qubits and qudits.
Electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) techniques are important tools for the storage of the quantum states of light fields in atomic ensembles and for enhancement of the interaction between photons. In this paper, we briefly summarize the recent experimental studies conducted by our group on enhanced cross-phase modulation based on double EIT effects, the quantum interference of stored dual-channel spin-wave excitations and the coherent manipulation of the spin wave vector for the polarization of photons in a single tripod atomic system. The work presented here has potential application in the developing field of quantum information processing.
We study the manipulation of slow light with an orbital angular momentum propagating in a cloud of cold atoms. Atoms are affected by four co-propagating control laser beams in a double tripod configuration of the atomic energy levels involved, allowing us to minimize the losses at the vortex core of the control beams. In such a situation the atomic medium is transparent for a pair of co-propagating probe fields, leading to the creation of two-component (spinor) slow light. We study the interaction between the probe fields when two control beams carry optical vortices of opposite helicity. As a result, a transfer of the optical vortex takes place from the control to the probe fields without switching off and on the control beams. This feature is missing in a single tripod scheme where the optical vortex can be transferred from the control to the probe field only during either the storage or retrieval of light.