Optimizing the fidelity of stored light in atomic ensembles

Ronald Lee Walsworth

Irina V. Novikova, Alexey Vyacheslavovich Gorshkov, David F. Phillips +3 more

We present a preliminary experimental study of optimized slow and stored light pulses in Rb vapor cells. We study the effciency of light storage as a function of pulse duration, storage time, retrieval field intensity, etc. We demonstrate a procedure based on time reversal for the optimization of the effciency for storage of light in atomic ensembles suggested in a recent theoretical paper [A.V. Gorshkov et al., e-print archive quant-ph/0604037 (2006)]. Experimental results are in a good qualitative agreement with theoretical calculations based on a simplified three-level model.

Alexey Vyacheslavovich Gorshkov, Axel André, Michael Fleischhauer +2 more

Ofer Firstenberg, Rami Pugatch, M. Shuker +2 more

The storage of light using electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) has become a well-known technique, with an obvious prospect for future quantum information systems. Utilizing this unique light-matter interaction, the complex amplitude of a 'probe' pulse can be stored onto the ground-state coherence of room-temperature atomic ensemble and can be retrieved after a controllable delay. The storage fidelity is limited by decay mechanisms of the ground-state coherence. This paper presents the study of the spatial behavior of two- and three-dimensional probe fields, under the influence of the thermal atomic diffusion.

Tingwan Wu, Qinzhi Chen

In this paper, we provide a numerical analysis for a simple quantum memory method to efficient store and retrieve of photon in a two-level atoms ensemble, based on photon echo techniques. It shows that the storage efficiency can nearly reach 100% with a high optical depth, and furthermore we analyze the optimal broadening for a given pulse width.

Wu, Qinzhi