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Physical Review A

Transient optical response of cold Rydberg atoms with electromagnetically induced transparency

Ya-Wei Guo, Si-Liu Xu, Jun-Rong He, Pan Deng, Milivoj R. Belić, Yuan Zhao

Published Feb 5, 2020• 56 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We investigate the linear and nonlinear optical response to an optical pumping of a four-level atomic system with electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) in a cold Rydberg atomic gas. It is found that the transient behavior (especially, the third- and fifth-order susceptibilities) of the probe field, and the steady-state EIT spectrum of the gas, depend crucially on the Rydberg atoms' interaction. Furthermore, we find that the response speed of the Rydberg interaction with EIT can be as much as six times faster than the EIT without the Rydberg interaction, and that the nonlinear response time of the fifth-order optical susceptibility is longer than that of the third-order susceptibility. It is established that the Rydberg blockade effect plays a significant role in increasing the response speed of the Rydberg with EIT.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.101.023806

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We investigate the linear and nonlinear optical response to an optical pumping of a four-level atomic system with electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) in a cold Rydberg atomic gas. It is found that the transient behavior (especially, the third- and fifth-order susceptibilities) of the probe field, and the steady-state EIT spectrum of the gas, depend crucially on the Rydberg atoms' interaction. Furthermore, we find that the response speed of the Rydberg interaction with EIT can be as much as six times faster than the EIT without the Rydberg interaction, and that the nonlinear response time of the fifth-order optical susceptibility is longer than that of the third-order susceptibility. It is established that the Rydberg blockade effect plays a significant role in increasing the response speed of the Rydberg with EIT.
We investigate the transient optical response property of an electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) in a cold Rydberg atomic gas. We show that both the transient behavior and the steady-state EIT spectrum of the system depend strongly on Rydberg interaction. Especially, the response speed of the Rydberg-EIT can be five times faster (and even higher) than the conventional EIT without the Rydberg interaction. For comparison, two different theoretical approaches (i.e., two-atom model and many-atom model) are considered, revealing that Rydberg blockade effect plays a significant role for increasing the response speed of the Rydberg-EIT. The fast-responding Rydberg-EIT by using the strong, tunable Rydberg interaction uncovered here is not only helpful for enhancing the understanding of the many-body dynamics of Rydberg atoms but also useful for practical applications in quantum information processing by using Rydberg atoms.
We investigate the optical Kerr nonlinearities of an ensemble of cold Rydberg atoms under the condition of electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT). By using an approach beyond mean-field theory, we show that the system possesses not only enhanced third-order nonlinear optical susceptibility, but also giant fifth-order nonlinear optical susceptibility, which has a cubic dependence on atomic density. Our results demonstrate that both the third-order and the fifth-order nonlinear optical susceptibilities consist of two parts, contributed respectively by photon-atom interaction and Rydberg-Rydberg interaction. The Kerr nonlinearity induced by the Rydberg-Rydberg interaction plays a leading role at high atomic density. We find that the fifth-order nonlinear optical susceptibility in the Rydberg-EIT system may be five orders of magnitude larger than that obtained in traditional EIT systems. The results obtained may have promising applications in light and quantum information processing and transmission at weak-light level.
We predict a resonant enhancement of the nonlinear optical response of an interacting Rydberg gas under conditions of electromagnetically induced transparency. The enhancement originates from a two-photon process which resonantly couples electronic states of a pair of atoms dressed by a strong control field. We calculate the optical response for the three-level system by explicitly including the dynamics of the intermediate state. We find an analytical expression for the third-order susceptibility for a weak classical probe field. The nonlinear absorption displays the strongest resonant behavior on two-photon resonance where the detuning of the probe field equals the Rabi frequency of the control field. The nonlinear dispersion of the medium exhibits various spatial shapes depending on the interaction strength. Based on the developed model, we propose a realistic experimental scenario to observe the resonance by performing transmission measurements.
We study the transmission properties of a probe field passing through a sample of NNN-type cold atoms possessing a high Rydberg state. Due to the conditioned dipole blockade of Rydberg excitation, this atomic sample might exhibit a nonlinear optical response in terms of electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) as manifested by the sensitivity of the transmitted probe intensity and correlation to input probe intensity and correlation. It is of particular interest that the nonlinear EIT response can be opposite (either normal or abnormal) in two different regions of probe detuning, which is a striking feature of the four-level N system of interacting atoms. The realization of both normal and abnormal nonlinear EIT effects in one atomic sample is expected to have wider applications in manipulation of photonic statistics of weak light signals, e.g., to attain prominent photonic bunching and/or antibunching in a dynamic quantum delay or memory process.
We use the technique of electro-magnetically induced transparency (EIT) to probe the effect of attractive dipole-dipole interactions in a highly excited Rydberg gas. The transient character of the EIT response is investigated by rapidly scanning the probe laser through resonance. We characterize the resulting cooperative optical non-linearity as a function of probe strength, density and scan direction. For the 58D5/2_{5/2}5/2​ Rydberg state, an atom density of $1.6\times10^{10} cmcmcm^{-3}$ and a positive frequency scan we measure a third-order non-linearity of χ(3)=5×10−7χ^{(3)}=5\times 10^{-7}χ(3)=5×10−7 m2^22V−2^{-2}−2. For the reverse scan we observe a second order non-linearity of χ(2)=5×10−6χ^{(2)}=5\times 10^{-6}χ(2)=5×10−6 mV−1^{-1}−1. The contrasting behaviour can be explained in terms of motional effects and resonant excitation of Rydberg pairs.
Transient response of four-level cold Rb atoms with light and microwave (MW) fields is investigated via electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) theoretically. The local control laser acts as a switch. When the control field is weak, the population transition channel from state 53 D 5/2 to state 5 S 1/2 is closed, which leads to that the transient absorption for the probe field monotonically decreases to its steady state. Nevertheless, when the control field becomes strong, the transition channel is open, which gives rise to that the transient absorption for the probe laser will be oscillatorily damped to the steady-state value, and transient negative absorption appears. A third MW field can induce splitting of the time-dependent EIT transmission spectrum, and the stable splitting distance shows a linear dependence on the continuous MW electric (E) field strength. Furthermore, the simulation results show that the temporal medium transmission signals are sensitive to the E-field strength of local MW pulse, and can be used to sense pulsed MW fields.