Comparison of steady and transient optical responses between a four-level Tripod system and a three-level Lambda system

Abstract

We study and compare the steady and transient optical responses of a four-level system and a three-level system, which are dressed by two and three laser fields, respectively. In the three-level system, a transmissivity window (a reflectivity platform) may be induced on the probe resonance by a traveling-wave (standing-wave) coupling field. In the four-level system, both transmissivity window and reflectivity platform are remarkably modified when a traveling-wave driving field is applied on two-photon resonance with the probe, but change little when the traveling-wave driving field is largely two-photon detuned. This implies that the four-level system can be safely treated as a three-level one in certain frequency regions of interest. Transient behaviors of atomic coherence on the probe resonance are also examined in both three-level and four-level systems to further confirm this conclusion. Our new findings are beneficial to achieve a novel all-optical routing scheme by simultaneously creating a transmissivity window and a reflectivity platform on a single resonance, and may also be used to simplify theoretical treatments in the situations where numerical calculations are complicated and intractable in the presence of at least one standing-wave field.