Coherence effects in the anisotropy of optical experiments

Terry van Dijk

Vladimir A. Sautenkov, Yuri V. Rostovtsev, H. Chen +3 more

Chirality has been extensively studied for well over a century, and its potential applications range from optics to chemistry, medicine, and biology. Ingenious experiments have been designed to measure this naturally small effect. Here we discuss the possibility of producing a medium having a large chiral effect by using the ideas of coherent control. The coherent fields resonant with appropriate transitions in atomic or molecular systems can be used to manipulate the optical properties of a medium. We demonstrate experimentally very large magnetochiral anisotropy by using electromagnetic fields in atomic Rb vapors.

M. Artoni, Iacopo Carusotto, Giuseppe Carlo La Rocca +1 more

We theoretically study how the phase of a light plane wave propagating in a resonant medium under electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) is affected by the uniform motion of the medium. For cuprous oxide (Cu2O), where EIT can be implemented through a typical pump-probe configuration, the resonant probe beam experiences a phase shift (Fresnel-Fizeau effect) that may vary over a wide range of values, positive or negative, and even vanishing, due to the combined effects of the strong frequency dispersion and anisotropy both induced by the pump. The use of such a coherently driven dragging medium may improve by at least 1 order of magnitude the sensitivity at low velocity in optical drag experiments.

David Köhler

R.W. Smith

James K. Freericks

There has been a recent resurgence of experimental efforts to quantitatively determine the phase diagram of the Bose-Hubbard model by carefully analyzing experiments with ultracold bosonic atoms on an optical lattice. In many realizations of these experiments, the hopping amplitudes are not homogeneous throughout the lattice, but instead, the lattice has an anisotropy where hopping along one direction is not exactly equal to hopping along a perpendicular direction. In this contribution, we examine how an anisotropy in the hopping matrix elements affects the Mott lobes of the Bose-Hubbard model. For weak anisotropy, we find the phase diagram is only slightly modified when expressed in terms of the average hopping, while for strong anisotropy, one expects to ultimately see dimensional crossover effects.