Optical bistability in one-dimensional doped photonic crystals with spontaneously generated coherence

Abstract

We investigate optical bistability in a multilayer one-dimensional photonic crystal where the central layer is doped with Λ-type three level atoms. We take into account the influence of spontaneously generated coherence when the lower atomic levels are sufficiently close to each other, in which case Kerr-type nonlinear response of the atoms is enhanced. We calculate the propagation of a probe beam in the defect mode window using numerical nonlinear transfer matrix method. We find that Rabi frequency of a control field acting on the defect layer and the detuning of the probe field from the atomic resonance can be used to control the size and contrast of the hysteresis loop and the threshold of the optical bistability. In particular we find that, at the optimal spontaneously generated coherence, three orders of magnitude lower threshold can be achieved relative to the case without the coherence.

Azimuthal modulation of light propagation through 1DPCs via efficient nonlinear frequency mixing

“…In the past 10 years, a lot of research has been done on controlling incident light passing through defect structures such as a dielectric slab [25][26][27][28][29] and one-dimensional photonic crystals (1DPCs) [17,[30][31][32][33]. As an example, Asadpour and Soleimani [34] looked into the reflection and dispersion spectra of a dielectric medium consisting of quantum dot nanostructures.…”

Controllable cavity linewidth narrowing via spontaneously generated coherence in a four level atomic system

“…On the other hand, atomic coherence can also be created through spontaneous emission in certain media if relevant decay pathways are correlated via the same vacuum modes, which is defined as spontaneously generated coherence (SGC). SGC gives rise to a variety of quantum effects, such as narrowing and quenching of spontaneous emission [13][14][15][16][17][18][19], amplification without inversion [20][21][22][23], transparency of a laser field [24,25] and modifying of nonlinearity [26][27][28][29][30][31][32] (optical bistability (OB) [26][27][28][29][30], enhancing Kerr nonlinearity [31] and electromagnetically induced grating [32]). Other novel applications of using SGC are the field of quantum photocell [33], high-precision metrology [34] and quantum heat energy [35].…”