Temporal coherent control of a sequential transition in rubidium atoms

Felinto, D.; Acioli, L. H.; Vianna, S. S.

doi:10.1364/ol.25.000917

Cited by 50 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…In Refs. [11,12,15], different aspects of the coherent interaction of ultrashort laser pulses with extended multilevel atomic media, particularly two-photon absorption, were considered. The existence of ultrafast collective oscillations were demonstrated in Ref.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Coherent interaction of laser pulses in a resonant optically dense extended medium under the regime of strong field-matter coupling

et al. 2004

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Nonstationary pump-probe interaction between short laser pulses propagating in a resonant optically dense coherent medium is considered. A special attention is paid to the case, where the density of two-level particles is high enough that a considerable part of the energy of relatively weak external laser-fields can be coherently absorbed and reemitted by the medium. Thus, the field of medium reaction plays a key role in the interaction processes, which leads to the collective behavior of an atomic ensemble in the strongly coupled light-matter system. Such behavior results in the fast excitation interchanges between the field and a medium in the form of the optical ringing, which is analogous to polariton beating in the solid-state optics. This collective oscillating response, which can be treated as successive beats between light wave-packets of different group velocities, is shown to significantly affect propagation and amplification of the probe field under its nonlinear interaction with a nearly copropagating pump pulse. Depending on the probe-pump time delay, the probe transmission spectra show the appearance of either specific doublet or coherent dip. The widths of these features are determined by the density-dependent field-matter coupling coefficient and increase during the propagation. Besides that, the widths of the coherent features, which appear close to the resonance in the broadband probe-spectrum, exceed the absorption-line width, since, under the strong-coupling regime, the frequency of the optical ringing exceeds the rate of incoherent relaxation. Contrary to the stationary strong-field effects, the density-and coordinate-dependent transmission spectra of the probe manifest the importance of the collective oscillations and cannot be obtained in the framework of the single-atom model.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Coherent interaction of laser pulses in a resonant optically dense extended medium under the regime of strong field-matter coupling

et al. 2004

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“…This transient excitation, however, can be mapped into a final, non-negligible excitation of a different atomic level by means of a second ultrashort field acting on the excited state during the transient [19], indicating its possible use for storage of information. All previous experimental studies of broadband pulse interaction with narrowband atomic ensembles were carried out with weak classical light pulses (see, for example, [15,[20][21][22]). However, the formation of 0-area single-photon (SP) pulses has also been predicted [23] and viewed as a possible way to engineer quantum states using time-dependent effects and for time-domain quantum information processing [24].…”

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confidence: 99%

Zero-Area Single-Photon Pulses

et al. 2016

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Broadband single photons are usually considered not to couple efficiently to atomic gases because of the large mismatch in bandwidth. Contrary to this intuitive picture, here we demonstrate that the interaction of ultrashort single photons with a dense resonant atomic sample deeply modifies the temporal shape of their wavepacket mode without degrading their non-classical character, and effectively generates zero-area single-photon pulses. This is a clear signature of strong transient coupling between single broadband (THz-level) light quanta and atoms, with intriguing fundamental implications and possible new applications to the storage of quantum information.Single photons are privileged carriers of quantum information because of their little interaction with the environment and among themselves. However, when it comes to storing and manipulating information, it would be useful for them to interact strongly with some atomic system in order to convert their quantum state into a stationary quantum state of matter [1]. Since atomic systems, either made of cold and ultracold atoms or of hot vapors, have absorption linewidths in the Hz to GHz range, the main road to enhance the atom-photon interaction has always been that of using sufficiently narrowband quantum photonic states, either produced in cavity-enhanced parametric down-conversion sources [2-5], or directly from cold [6][7][8][9] or hot [10, 11] atomic samples. In general, ultrashort single photons with bandwidths much broader than the atomic bandwidth are therefore not considered useful for this task because they are thought to interact only very weakly with the atoms. This is not necessarily true.Resonant interaction between ultrashort classical pulses and atomic media has long been investigated, together with some of its most peculiar effects. Two-photon transitions, for example, are well known to involve the whole bandwidth of an ultrashort pulse and to benefit considerably from the broad shaping of its spectral profile [12,13]. The formation of zero-area pulses is another spectacular consequence of the propagation of weak ultrashort pulses in the dispersive medium around an atomic resonance [14,15]. Considering a laser pulse whose description in frequency space is initially given by E(ω, 0), propagation through a distance l in the resonant medium modifies it to:where α 0 is the optical density of the medium, ω a is the atomic resonance frequency, and T 2 is the upper level lifetime. This approximate expression, which considers two-level atoms and an effective single lorentzian profile for the resonance line of the sample is enough to convey all the main features of the phenomenon. If the atomic transition is sufficiently narrow, the absorbed pulse energy can be almost negligible even in the case of high optical depths, but dispersion may still cause a dramatic re-shaping of the temporal pulse envelope. In accordance to the pulse area theorem [16][17][18], the electric field amplitude of the pulse rapidly develops a series of lobes of alternating signs ...

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“…In the case of Rb atoms, they are often excited to the 7S or 5D states from the 5S ground state via twophoton processes that are enhanced by the 5P intermediate state. The population dynamics of the excited state were monitored by recording intensity of either fluorescence or the 420 nm SF on the 6P-5S transition [14][15][16]18]. In doing so, we reported an observation of a beating at 7.12 THz (time period of 140 fs) due to the simultaneous excitations of the 5P 1∕2 and 5P 3∕2 states in [17].…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Recently, ultrafast laser control of two-photon transitions in atoms and molecules has been of great interest [11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19]. In typical temporal coherent control in twophoton transitions, the atoms and molecules are excited by a pair of collinear, ultrashort pulses with variable time delay.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Temporal coherent control of superfluorescent pulses

2012

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We demonstrate that collective atomic interferences can be investigated by measuring the superfluorescence (SF) time delay. A pair of broadband (≈20 nm), ultrashort (≈80 fs), collinear pulses with a variable delay coherently excites rubidium (Rb) atoms. The generated superfluorescent pulses at 420 nm on the cascade transition are recorded by a picosecond streak camera. Both intensity and SF time delay of the 420 nm pulse are altered as the delay between input pulses varies. In particular, the SF time delay of the normalized 420 nm pulse exhibits oscillations with different periods. This can be understood in terms of atomic and quantum interferences due to two possible two-photon excitation pathways through the intermediate levels (Rb D-lines).

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Temporal coherent control of a sequential transition in rubidium atoms

Cited by 50 publications

References 12 publications

Coherent interaction of laser pulses in a resonant optically dense extended medium under the regime of strong field-matter coupling

Coherent interaction of laser pulses in a resonant optically dense extended medium under the regime of strong field-matter coupling

Zero-Area Single-Photon Pulses

Temporal coherent control of superfluorescent pulses

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