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arXiv:quant-ph/9904034 · Physical Review Letters

Nondegenerate Parametric Self-Oscillation via Multiwave Mixing in Coherent Atomic Media

Alexander S. Zibrov, Mikhail D. Lukin, Marlan O. Scully

Published Nov 15, 1999• 150 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We demonstrate an efficient nonlinear process in which Stokes and anti-Stokes components are generated spontaneously in a multilevel medium coherently prepared by resonant, counterpropagating fields. A medium of this kind combines large nonlinear gain and efficient intrinsic feedback, thereby allowing for very weak optical fields to induce nonlinear processes. Mirrorless self-oscillation induced by microwatts of light power (nanojoules of pulse energy) is observed.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.83.4049

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We demonstrate an efficient nonlinear process in which Stokes and anti-Stokes components are generated spontaneously in a multilevel medium coherently prepared by resonant, counterpropagating fields. A medium of this kind combines large nonlinear gain and efficient intrinsic feedback, thereby allowing for very weak optical fields to induce nonlinear processes. Mirrorless self-oscillation induced by microwatts of light power (nanojoules of pulse energy) is observed.
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Nonlinear optical parametric processes are studied in a resonantly driven multilevel system displaying quantum interference effects. It is shown that in such systems a new regime of nonlinear amplification is possible, in which a pair of correlated Stokes and anti-Stokes fields can be generated from infinitesimally small initial values. An atomic coherence grating emerges during this process of efficient nonlinear amplification. The present analysis explains the results of recent optical phase conjugation experiments involving atomic phase coherence.
We report the demonstration of a mirrorless optical parametric oscillator with a tunable threshold in laser-cooled atoms with four-wave mixing (FWM) using electromagnetically induced transparency. Driven by two classical laser beams, the generated Stokes and anti-Stokes fields counterpropagate and build up efficient intrinsic feedback through the nonlinear FWM process. This feedback does not involve any cavity or spatially distributed microstructures. We observe the transition of photon correlation properties from the biphoton quantum regime (below the threshold) to the oscillation regime (above the threshold). The pump threshold can be tuned by varying the operating parameters. We achieve the oscillation with a threshold as low as 15 μW.
We study experimentally nonlinear optical processes in which Stokes and anti-Stokes fields build up under strong, resonant, counterpropagating pump laser excitation in atomic sodium vapor. We find that, at some pump frequency, two off-axis anti-Stokes emissions propagating along reflection-symmetric directions are strongly temporally correlated, with a correlation time of $0.5\phantom{\rule{0.3em}{0ex}}\ensuremath{\mu}\mathrm{s}$ and a correlation range of 1mrad1\phantom{\rule{0.3em}{0ex}}\mathrm{mrad}1mrad. It is shown by the numerical analysis based on six-wave mixing process involving pump, Stokes, and anti-Stokes waves in the forward and the backward directions that such correlated anti-Stokes emissions are possible when the medium is opaque for the Stokes field and transparent for the anti-Stokes field. Possibilities of quantum correlation for entangled photon generation using this system are discussed.
Tunable Rydberg interactions in cold atoms can be used to generate strongly correlated photon pairs through a spontaneous four-wave-mixing process in which all driving fields are allowed to work on resonance. The scheme relies on electromagnetically induced transparency and an imbalanced dark state with most atoms trapped in a ground state and a weakly populated Rydberg state. We show in particular that the combination of these two effects results in negligible linear absorption and Raman gain at the Stokes and anti-Stokes frequencies of generated photon pairs, while the nonlocal (Rydberg) nonlinearities contribute significantly to the enhancement of photon-pair generation rates and cross correlations at very low pump strengths and optical depths.