Quantum Optics of Dielectric Media

Stephen Mark Barnett

R. Grobe

We summarize recent developments in the area of the coherent propagation of laser pulses through dielectric media.We will show that the principle of dynamical adiabaticity opens new avenues to control the non-perturbative .and resonant interaction between two laser pulses and a three-level medium.Examples include the formation of stable wave forms that can travel through optical dielectric media in a loss-free manner with arbitrary pulse shapes, novel possibilities to store optical information in dielectric media in the form of spatially dependent excitations and techniques to exploit this information to control laser pulse envelopes.

Michael E. Crenshaw

Stefan Scheel, L. Knöll, D.‐G. Welsch

Quantization of the phenomenological Maxwell theory of the electromagnetic field in dispersive and absorbing dielectrics has been of increasing interest over the last years since it allows for a consistent formulation of quantum optics in the presence of dielectric bodies. We show, using a Dyson-type integral representation of the Green tensor, that the quantization scheme is consistent with QED for both isotropic and anisotropic media and therefore applies to arbitrary linear Kramers-Kronig media including amplifying media.

Malin Premaratne, Govind Prasad Agrawal

The study of optical effects in active media is rich with unexpected consequences. For instance, one may imagine that absorption and amplification in a dielectric medium will exhibit some sort of symmetry because both are related to the same imaginary part of the dielectric constant, except for a sign change. It turns out that such a symmetry does not exist [1]. This issue has also been investigated in detail for random or disordered gain media, with varying viewpoints [2]. Traditionally, much of the research on amplifying media has considered the interaction of light within the entire volume of such a medium. Recent interest in metamaterials and other esoteric structures in which plasmons are used to manipulate optical signals has brought attention to the role of surface waves in active dielectrics [3, 4]. From a fundamental perspective, the main difference between active and passive media is that spontaneous emission cannot be avoided in gain media. As a result, a rigorous analysis of gain media demands a quantum-mechanical treatment. Spontaneous emission in a gain medium depends not only on the material properties of that medium but also on the optical modes supported by the structure containing that material [5]. By a clever design of this structure (e.g., photonic crystals or microdisk resonators with a metallic cladding), it is possible to control the local density of optical modes and the spontaneous emission process itself. In Chapter 4, we discuss how to model a gain medium under such conditions by deploying optical Bloch equations.