Frustrated pulse-area quantization in accelerated superradiant atom-cavity systems

Abstract

In self-induced transparency (SIT), as described by the McCall-Hahn area theorem, the area of an optical pulse is modified as it propagates through a resonant absorbing medium, and in the limit of high optical thickness evolves to certain discrete (quantized) output values. We investigate the area evolution experienced by an optical pulse when interacting with an absorbing medium contained within a cavity. In the system studied, the intracavity medium is weakly attenuating on a single-pass basis, but the atom-cavity system's effective optical thickness as viewed from input to output port is generally quite large. Interestingly, at the low end of effective optical thickness we find that the cavity system generates pulse-area evolution closely mirroring that seen in the SIT system, i.e., output pulse areas evolve toward stable values as the effective optical thickness increases. However, when the effective optical thickness increases to certain triggering levels, the output pulse area is seen to drop abruptly toward zero. Our theoretical predictions are experimentally probed using cavity-contained cryogenically coherence-stabilized ${\mathrm{Tm}}^{3+}$ ions.