Absolute instability and pattern formation in cold atomic vapors

Muradyan, G. A.; Wang, Yingxue; Williams, William G.; Saffman, M.

doi:10.1364/nlgw.2005.thb29

Cited by 15 publications

(31 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…The requisite theory is related to that used to analyze pattern formation in a mirrorless thick medium (slab) with two counterpropagating (CP) input fields. Such CP systems have been analyzed for Kerr media by Firth et al [17] and Geddes et al [18], as well as by Muradyan et al [10], as part of a study of optomechanical effects in cold atoms.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Thick-medium model of transverse pattern formation in optically excited cold two-level atoms with a feedback mirror

et al. 2017

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We study a pattern-forming instability in a laser-driven optically thick cloud of cold two-level atoms with a planar feedback mirror. We develop a theoretical model, enabling a full analysis of transverse patterns in a medium with saturable nonlinearity, taking into account diffraction within the medium, and both the transmission and reflection gratings. The focus of the analysis is on the combined treatment of nonlinear propagation in a diffractively and optically thick medium and the boundary condition given by feedback. We demonstrate explicitly how diffraction within the medium breaks the degeneracy of Talbot modes inherent in thin-slice models. We predict the existence of envelope curves bounding all possible pattern-formation thresholds and illustrate their interaction with threshold curves by experimental observation of a sudden transition between length scales as mirror displacement is varied.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Thick-medium model of transverse pattern formation in optically excited cold two-level atoms with a feedback mirror

et al. 2017

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“…Beyond a critical NLO interaction strength, we observe an instability that gives rise to new beams of light. Saffman et al have described theoretically such instabilities in a thermal gas of cold atoms [16,17] and have shown that the necessary nonlinear interaction strength is smaller than in other media. To the best of our knowledge, this paper represents the first experimental report of mirrorless parametric optical instabilities and pattern formation in cold atoms.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bunching-induced optical nonlinearity and instability in cold atoms [Invited]

Greenberg¹,

Schmittberger²,

Gauthier³

2011

Opt. Express

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Abstract:We report a new nonlinear optical process that occurs in a cloud of cold atoms at low-light-levels when the incident optical fields simultaneously polarize, cool, and spatially-organize the atoms. We observe an extremely large effective fifth-order nonlinear susceptibility of χ (5) = 7.6 × 10 −15 (m/V) 4 , which results in efficient Bragg scattering via six-wave mixing, slow group velocities (∼ c/10 5 ), and enhanced atomic coherence times (> 100 µs). In addition, this process is particularly sensitive to the atomic temperatures, and provides a new tool for in-situ monitoring of the atomic momentum distribution in an optical lattice. For sufficiently large light-matter couplings, we observe an optical instability for intensities as low as ∼ 1 mW/cm 2 in which new, intense beams of light are generated and result in the formation of controllable transverse optical patterns.

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“…In this paper, we will use the term collective atomic recoil lasing (CARL) as a general label for collective instabilities that involve simultaneous growth of optical fields and atomic density modulations with periods on the scale of the optical wavelength, although it should be noted that the literature on this topic contains a number of other names for related effects, including, e.g., recoil-induced resonance, superradiant Rayleigh scattering (SRS) and optomechanics. Since the initial theoretical studies of CARL [1,2], numerous theoretical and experimental studies have been performed on related phenomena involving optical forces and cold atoms, e.g., instabilities involving self-organisation , collective cooling [24][25][26], optomechanical transverse pattern formation [27][28][29][30][31][32] and quantum simulation [33][34][35]. Experiments have involved a variety of atomic media, e.g., both thermal [8][9][10][11] and degenerate gases [3,7,12,17,20,23,[33][34][35], and a diverse range of configurations, including optical cavities consisting of multiple mirrors [8,9,11,20,23,[33][34][35][36], single mirror feedback [31] and mirrorless configurations [3,7,…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Two-Photon Collective Atomic Recoil Lasing

McKelvie

Robb

2015

Atoms

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We present a theoretical study of the interaction between light and a cold gas of three-level, ladder configuration atoms close to two-photon resonance. In particular, we investigate the existence of collective atomic recoil lasing (CARL) instabilities in different regimes of internal atomic excitation and compare to previous studies of the CARL instability involving two-level atoms. In the case of two-level atoms, the CARL instability is quenched at high pump rates with significant atomic excitation by saturation of the (one-photon) coherence, which produces the optical forces responsible for the instability and rapid heating due to high spontaneous emission rates. We show that in the two-photon CARL scheme studied here involving three-level atoms, CARL instabilities can survive at high pump rates when the atoms have significant excitation, due to the contributions to the optical forces from multiple coherences and the reduction of spontaneous emission due to transitions between the populated states being dipole forbidden. This two-photon CARL scheme may form the basis of methods to increase the effective nonlinear optical response of cold atomic gases.

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Absolute instability and pattern formation in cold atomic vapors

Cited by 15 publications

References 6 publications

Thick-medium model of transverse pattern formation in optically excited cold two-level atoms with a feedback mirror

Thick-medium model of transverse pattern formation in optically excited cold two-level atoms with a feedback mirror

Bunching-induced optical nonlinearity and instability in cold atoms [Invited]

Two-Photon Collective Atomic Recoil Lasing

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