Highly efficient inelastic four-wave mixing using dual induced transparency and coherently prepared states

Abstract

We investigate a life time broadened and coherently prepared five-state system for multi-wave mixing processes. We show that very efficient wave mixing occurs, producing an unconventional mixing wave that has the characteristics of both conventional four-wave mixing (FWM) and stimulated hyper-Raman (SHR) emission. In addition, we show interesting multiple simultaneous multi-photon interference effects at large propagation distances and demonstrate more than 10 orders of magnitude suppression of populations of the probe wave terminal state and the near three-photon resonance mixing wave generating state. These new type of multi-photon interference based induced transparency effects, which are critically dependent on two distinctive relaxation processes involving both an external supplied and an internally generated fields, are fundamentally different from the conventional three-state electromagnetically induced transparency effect which does not depend on propagation. As a consequence, both the probe and the wave-mixing field to propagate nearly free of absorption and distortions in a highly dispersive medium. Published by Elsevier B.V.