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Frontiers in Optics

Rabi Oscillations in the Intensity Correlations Between Four-Wave Mixing Signals in a Cold Atomic Sample

A. A. C. de Almeida, M. R. L. da Motta, S. S. Vianna

Published Jan 1, 2023• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We report the experimental observation of intensity correlations between two forward four-wave mixing signals generated in a cold rubidium sample and between the transmission signals, with both results exhibiting Rabi oscillations in the cross-correlation curves.
DOI
10.1364/fio.2023.jtu4a.9

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We study the field-intensity fluctuations of two independent four-wave-mixing signals generated in a cold rubidium sample as well as the transmission signals. We employ an experimental setup using a single cw laser to induce the nonlinear process in a forward geometry using either parallel and circular or orthogonal and linear polarizations of the input fields. Even though the spectra of each experimental configuration are significantly different due to the distinct level structures of each scenario, both cases present intensity-intensity cross correlations of the four-wave-mixing signals. We also calculate the cross correlation between the input fields and draft a theoretical model that indicates that resonant phase-noise to amplitude-noise conversion allows the observation of Rabi oscillations in the cross-correlation curves.
We investigate the influence of the distribution of atom velocities in a hot rubidium sample on the correlation between field-intensity fluctuations of two independently generated four-wave mixing signals and between the transmission signals. The nonlinear process is driven by a single continuous-wave (cw) laser in a pure two-level system due to the forward geometry with circular and parallel polarization of the input fields. The intensity cross correlations of the four-wave mixing signals and the transmission signals present an oscillatory behavior with a clear dependence on the power of the incident fields, which indicates a connection with Rabi oscillations. A two-level theoretical model using stochastic differential equations to account for the mechanism of conversion of phase noise into amplitude noise shows good agreement with our experimental results. Moreover, we show how the response of the system is affected by the different atomic velocity groups.
In this work, we present a set of experiments involving four-wave mixing processes in rubidium atoms. We employ several experimental configurations exploring two- and three-level systems in cascade or Λ configurations, all of which are in a copropagating geometry, to investigate different physical phenomena present in each scenario. In the first experiment, we combine a cw diode laser and a 1 GHz femtosecond pulse train to generate coherent blue light through the four-wave mixing process in hot rubidium vapor. The generated coherent signal is analyzed by scanning either the diode frequency or the repetition rate of the frequency comb. In both cases, the cw laser induces an Autler- Townes splitting with a wide separation in the doublet structure due to the configuration of copropagating fields. To model these results, we employ the density matrix formalism to write the Bloch equations and solve them numerically. The solutions allow us to explore other cases beyond those involving our experimental setup, comparing the response of the upper-level population and the generated signal coherence for homogeneously and non-homogeneously broadened systems. Moreover, in this same experiment, we also observed an unexpected interference effect between excitation routes of the four-wave mixing process when the repetition rate of the pulse train is scanned. The theoretical model demonstrates that the interfering effect appears only when the repetition rate is carefully chosen to produce a pair of modes of the frequency comb resonant with both one- and two-photon transitions for the same atomic velocity group. In the second experiment, still with a hot rubidium vapor, we explore two symmetrical degenerate four- wave mixing signals induced by two almost copropagating laser beams, with~ka and~kb wave-vectors, and detected simultaneously in the 2~ka −~kb and 2~kb −~ka directions. Each spectrum has a single peak with a short frequency separation between them, which our model indicates is due to the nonlinear behavior of the refractive indexes, a consequence of the high intensity of both input fields. Finally, we use the same experimental setup for the two symmetrical signals to study the field intensity fluctuations of the degenerate four-wave mixing signals and the transmission signals. In this case, the sample is an ensemble of cold rubidium atoms in a magneto-optical trap. There is an intensity- intensity cross-correlation between the signals due to the resonant phase-noise to amplitude-noise conversion. In this type of cold system, we can neglect the Doppler- broadening, allowing a straightforward study of the dependency of the correlations on the laser detuning. In these measurements, we observe a type of oscillation in the correlation curves that the theoretical model indicates to be connected with Rabi oscillations, revealed by the fluctuations long after the transient period.
Quantum correlations in four-wave-mixing from ensembles of cold two-level atoms may prevail without filtering over background light with well-known classical interpretations, such as Rayleigh scattering, as recently experimentally demonstrated in Phys. Rev. Lett. 128, 083601 (2022). Here we provide an extended investigation of this effect, in which we detail the experimental procedure and the variation of the quantum correlation with various parameters of the system. Particularly, we show that the decay rate of the quantum correlations changes with the number of atoms in the sample, providing another indication of its superradiance-like nature. The nonclassical aspects of the signal occur for short timescales, but the long timescales carry as well a lot of information on the classical correlations of the system. This slow classical regime presents also two clearly distinct timescales, which we explain by two different pathways for the creation of biphotons. From the global analysis of the data in all its timescales, we are able to derive an empirical expression to fit the data, resulting in information on, among other parameters, the sample's temperature and superradiant-like acceleration. In general, the reported quantum correlations present a dependence on critical parameters of the system, such as optical depth and excitation power, that is quite different from other systems used for biphoton generation, and are more robust to changes in these parameters. This opens the possibility of exploring this process for efficient generation of narrow-band biphotons or of other quantum-correlated photonic states of higher order.