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Applied Physics Letters

Multi-wave mixing using a single vector optical field

Tengfei Jiao, Xuemei Cheng, Qian Zhang, Weilong Li, Zhaoyu Ren

Published Nov 11, 2019• 3 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The traditional multiwave mixing setups are always complicated because multiple laser beams are involved, and they are required to be aligned into certain spatial configurations to get the phase-matching condition satisfied. Here, we report on a multiwave mixing method using a single vector optical field. The spatially separated phase-matching beams are obtained after the vector light passes through a polarizer. Filtering out part(s) of them and focusing the remaining ones into the Rb vapor cell, we detected degenerate four-wave mixing, degenerate six-wave mixing, and coexisting degenerate four-wave mixing signals under different circumstances. As the beams participating in the multiwave mixing processes originate from the same phase plane of the vector laser beam, their relative positions are fixed for the setup so that this method has the potential to resist for turbulence compared with the traditional methods. Besides, the entire system is simple and easy to align because the complicated optical setup is avoided. This work provides a convenient tool for multiwave mixing generation and has great potential in spectroscopy, light squeezing, nonlinear optics, and so on.

DOI
10.1063/1.5121785

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The traditional multiwave mixing setups are always complicated because multiple laser beams are involved, and they are required to be aligned into certain spatial configurations to get the phase-matching condition satisfied. Here, we report on a multiwave mixing method using a single vector optical field. The spatially separated phase-matching beams are obtained after the vector light passes through a polarizer. Filtering out part(s) of them and focusing the remaining ones into the Rb vapor cell, we detected degenerate four-wave mixing, degenerate six-wave mixing, and coexisting degenerate four-wave mixing signals under different circumstances. As the beams participating in the multiwave mixing processes originate from the same phase plane of the vector laser beam, their relative positions are fixed for the setup so that this method has the potential to resist for turbulence compared with the traditional methods. Besides, the entire system is simple and easy to align because the complicated optical setup is avoided. This work provides a convenient tool for multiwave mixing generation and has great potential in spectroscopy, light squeezing, nonlinear optics, and so on.
We report on a new method to achieve the single-scan polarization-resolved degenerate four-wave mixing (DFWM) spectroscopy in a Rb atomic medium using a vector optical field, in which two pump beams are kept linearly polarized and a vector beam is employed as the probe beam. As the polarization and intensity of the DFWM signal are closely dependent on the polarization state of the probe beam, a vector probe beam with space-variant states of polarization is able to generate a DFWM signal with space-variant states of polarization and intensity across the DFWM image. Accordingly, the polarization-resolved spectra can be retrieved from a single DFWM image. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that the single-scan polarization-resolved spectrum detection has been realized experimentally with a vector beam. This work provides a simple but efficient single-scan polarization-resolved spectroscopic method, which would be of great utility for the samples of poor light stability and fast optical processes.
A quantum theory of degenerate four-wave mixing is presented in which the atomic medium consists of stationary four-level atoms, each with three degenerate excited states, and the interacting light beams are allowed to be in different states of polarization. This vector-field theory differs from the scalar-field theory of Reid and Walls [Phys. Rev. A 31, 1622 (1985)] in that there are new atomic variables in the Langevin equations which are related to the induced coherence between the upper atomic states. It is found, for the assumed set of atomic levels, that this seemingly different mechanism of four-wave-mixing gain does not circumvent the degrading effect of spontaneous emission on squeezing obtainable via degenerate four-wave mixing. The theory is applied to both forward and backward degenerate four-wave mixing with nearly collinear geometry, and specialized to the case in which the polarization states of the two pump modes are mutually orthogonal. It is found that for both forward and backward configurations, the range of pump intensity for which squeezing can be achieved in the vector-field case is larger than that in the scalar-field case, and the maximum amount of squeezing obtainable at a particular pump detuning is comparable in both cases.
We have generated squeezed states of light with a single pump beam propagating through Doppler broadened sodium vapor via forward four-wave mixing (FWM) with spatially degenerate pump and probe modes. The two probe-mode inputs are vacuum states at nondegenerate frequencies, which are transformed to squeezed vacuum by the FWM interaction. Compared with previous FWM configurations,1 this single-pass single-pump-beam configuration ensures maximal overlap of the four interacting beams, thus maximizing the squeezing nonlinearity and improving the overall efficiency. The transmitted pump has the wrong phase to act as the local oscillator for detecting the squeezed spectrum.1 Therefore, a cavity is used to filter out most of the transmitted pump intensity, and the squeezed vacuum is detected with another local oscillator using the standard dual-detector scheme. The residual pump beam provides a reference to monitor the phase between the pump and squeezed vacuum. The observed 0.8-dB reduction in the shot noise corresponds to an inferred 50% squeezing of the light at the exit of the vapor medium, which is in reasonable agreement with the theory given by Ho et al. 2 A linearly polarized pump is found to give less squeezing than a circularly polarized pump, possibly due to optical pumping.
Light entanglement holds the potential for quantum telecommunication and quan- tum computing. The goal of the project is to produce a pair of polarization-entangled light fields using Four Wave Mixing (FWM) in hot Rb vapor. In this process interaction of atoms with near-resonant strong control optical field results in strong amplification of a probe optical field and in generation of a quantum correlated conjugate Stokes opti- cal field. The optimum parameters for FWM have been established. Through analysis of the noise, the RF settings allowing for experimental quantum noise to match the shot noise has been confirmed as well. After establishing the shot noise limit, there were many trials to achieve noise lower than the shot noise. To further improve the noise and thus establish the quantum correlation between our fields, we switched from a single laser to a double laser setup. In the future, the quantum correlation between the Stokes field and the probe field will be further improved to allow for the entangled Bell states creation.
We present experimental results on the generation of multi-spatial-mode, single-beam, quadrature squeezed light using four-wave mixing in hot Rb vapor. Squeezing and phase-sensitive deamplification are observed over a range of powers and detunings near the (85)Rb D1 atomic transition. We observe -3 dB of vacuum quadrature squeezing, comparable to the best single-spatial mode results previously reported using atomic vapors, however, produced here in multiple spatial modes. We confirm that the squeezing is present in more than one transverse mode by studying the spatial distribution of the noise properties of the field.