Light storage in an optically thick atomic ensemble under conditions of electromagnetically induced transparency and four-wave mixing

Journal Article · Wed Jun 15 00:00:00 EDT 2011 · Physical Review. A

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PHYSREVA.83.063823· OSTI ID:21550204

Phillips, Nathaniel B; Novikova, Irina ^[1]; Gorshkov, Alexey V ^[2]

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1. Department of Physics, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia 23185 (United States)
2. Institute for Quantum Information, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California 91125 (United States)

We study the modification of a traditional electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) stored-light technique that includes both EIT and four-wave mixing (FWM) in an ensemble of hot Rb atoms. The standard treatment of light storage involves the coherent and reversible mapping of one photonic mode onto a collective spin coherence. It has been shown that unwanted, competing processes such as four-wave mixing are enhanced by EIT and can significantly modify the signal optical pulse propagation. We present theoretical and experimental evidence to indicate that, while a Stokes field is indeed detected upon retrieval of the signal field, any information originally encoded in a seeded Stokes field is not independently preserved during the storage process. We present a simple model that describes the propagation dynamics of the fields and the impact of FWM on the spin wave.

• OSTI ID: 21550204
• Journal Information: Physical Review. A, Vol. 83, Issue 6; Other Information: DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevA.83.063823; (c) 2011 American Institute of Physics; ISSN 1050-2947
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

74 ATOMIC AND MOLECULAR PHYSICS
ELECTROMAGNETIC FIELDS
FREQUENCY MIXING
MAPPING
MODIFICATIONS
OPACITY
PULSES
RUBIDIUM
SPIN
SPIN WAVES
STORAGE
VISIBLE RADIATION
ALKALI METALS
ANGULAR MOMENTUM
ELECTROMAGNETIC RADIATION
ELEMENTS
METALS
OPTICAL PROPERTIES
PARTICLE PROPERTIES
PHYSICAL PROPERTIES
RADIATIONS