Numerical Simulation of EIT-Based Slow Light in the Doppler-Broadened Atomic Media of the Rubidium D2 Line

Abstract

Quantum coherence and interference effects (Scully & Zubairy, 1997) in atomic systems have attracted great attention in the last two decades. With quantum coherence, the absorption and dispersion properties of an optical medium can be extremely modified, and can lead to many important effects such as coherent population trapping (CPT) (Arimondo & Orriols, 1976; Alzetta et al., 1976; Gray et al., 1978), lasing without inversion (LWI) (Harris, 1989; Scully et al., 1989; Padmabandu et al., 1996), electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) (Boller et al., 1991; Harris, 1997; Ham et al., 1997; Phillips et al., 2003; Fleischhauer et al., 2005; Marangos, 1998), high refractive index without absorption (Scully, 1991; Scully & Zhu, 1992; Harris et al., 1990), giant Kerr effect (Schmidt & Imamoglu, 1996), slow and fast light (Boyd & Gauthier, 2002), light storage (Phillips et al., 2001), and other effects. In particular, EIT plays an important role in the quantum optics area. EIT, named by Harris and his co-workers, has been extensively studied both experimentally and theoretically since it was proposed in 1990 (Harris et al., 1990). Harris et al. first experimentally demonstrated EIT in Sr atomic vapour in 1991 (Boller et al., 1991), providing the basis for further EIT works. Subsequently, M. Xiao and co-workers successfully observed the EIT effect in Rb vapor by using continuous wave (CW) diode lasers (Xiao et al., 1995; Li & Xiao, 1995). This work simplified EIT research, and attracted related research. With the growth of EIT technique, the researchers also realized EIT in several solid state materials and semiconductors (Serapoglia et al., 2000; Zhao et al., 1997; Ham et al., 1997). These works provide a firm foundation for EIT-based applications. One of EIT applications is slow light. Due to the steep dispersion property within the EIT transparency window, EIT can be used to control the group velocity of light. In the past decade, ultraslow group velocity based on EIT (Harris et al., 1992) has drawn much attention to quantum optical applications, such as quantum memories (Liu et al., 2001; Turukhin et al., 2002; Julsgaard et al., 2004), quantum entanglement generations (Lukin & Hemmer, 2000; Petrosyan & Kurizki, 2002; Paternostro et al., 2003), quantum routing (Ham, 2008), and quantum information processing (Nielsen & Chuang, 2000). So far EIT-based slow light has