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Title: Electromagnetically induced grating via enhanced nonlinear modulation by spontaneously generated coherence

Journal Article · · Physical Review. A
; ; ; ;  [1]
  1. Key Lab of Coherent Light and Atomic and Molecular Spectroscopy of Ministry of Education, College of Physics, Jilin University, Changchun 130023 (China)

By investigating the third-order nonlinearity of a four-level ladder-type atomic system, it is found that, with spontaneously generated coherence (SGC) present, the nonlinear absorption or refraction can be significantly enhanced with vanishing linear absorption. We attribute the enhancement of nonlinearity mainly to quantum interference in the two decay pathways from the two upper closely lying levels. With a standing-wave trigger field, absorption or phase grating, which effectively diffracts a weak probe into high-order direction, can be induced by the SGC-enhanced absorptive or refractive nonlinear modulation. In contrast to the schemes for enhancing nonlinearity, no additional coupling field is required. Moreover, the present gratings result from the nonlinear modulation, which differs from the recent investigations based on linear modulation.

OSTI ID:
21541381
Journal Information:
Physical Review. A, Vol. 83, Issue 3; Other Information: DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevA.83.033824; (c) 2011 American Institute of Physics; ISSN 1050-2947
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English