Abstract
We demonstrate a coherent and dynamic beam splitter based on light storage in cold atoms. An input weak laser pulse is first stored in a cold atom ensemble via electromagnetically-induced transparency (EIT). A set of counter-propagating control fields, applied at a later time, retrieves the stored pulse into two output spatial modes. The high visibility interference between the two output pulses clearly demonstrates that the beam splitting process is coherent. Furthermore, by manipulating the control lasers, it is possible to dynamically control the storage time, the power splitting ratio, the relative phase, and the optical frequencies of the output pulses. With further improvements, the active beam splitter demonstrated in this work might have applications in photonic photonic quantum information and in all-optical information processing.
Highlights
We demonstrate a coherent and dynamic beam splitter based on light storage in cold atoms
By employing electromagnetically-induced transparency (EIT)-based light storage, we demonstrate that a weak laser pulse can be coherently and dynamically manipulated in a cold atom ensemble to perform beam splitting, reflection, and phase shifting, in addition to quantum memory operation
The horizontally (H) polarized input signal pulse is transformed to right circular polarization and focused into the atomic ensemble of cold atoms of 87 rubidium prepared in a magneto-optical trap (MOT)
Summary
We demonstrate a coherent and dynamic beam splitter based on light storage in cold atoms. By employing EIT-based light storage, we demonstrate that a weak laser pulse can be coherently and dynamically manipulated in a cold atom ensemble to perform beam splitting, reflection, and phase shifting, in addition to quantum memory operation. This kind of approach may curtail the number of required elements in that such a unit can function as several optical components and is reconfigurable according to requested operations. While beam splitters based on passive linear optics are widely available at low cost, there are growing needs for dynamic beam splitting devices in which the splitting ratio can be varied Such devices integrated with coherent optical memory functionalities can significantly reduce resource requirement in photonic quantum information and all-optical information processing. Our scheme is based on the EIT-based light storage scheme in a rubidium cold atomic ensemble: The photonic excitation www.nature.com/scientificreports/
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