Abstract
Realizing single light bullets and vortices that are stable in high dimensions is a long-standing goal in the study of nonlinear optical physics. On the other hand, the storage and retrieval of such stable high dimensional optical pulses may offer a variety of applications. Here we present a scheme to generate such optical pulses in a cold Rydberg atomic gas. By virtue of electromagnetically induced transparency, strong, long-range atom-atom interaction in Rydberg states is mapped to light fields, resulting in a giant, fast-responding nonlocal Kerr nonlinearity and the formation of light bullets and vortices carrying orbital angular momenta, which have extremely low generation power, very slow propagation velocity, and can stably propagate, with the stability provided by the combination of local and the nonlocal Kerr nonlinearities. We demonstrate that the light bullets and vortices obtained can be stored and retrieved in the system with high efficiency and fidelity. Our study provides a new route for manipulating high-dimensional nonlinear optical processes via the controlled optical nonlinearities in cold Rydberg gases.
Highlights
High-dimensional spatiotemporal optical solitons, alias light bullets (LBs) [1], are solitary nonlinear waves localized in m-spatial dimensions and one time axis m 1D; m 1, 2, 3
We see that the LB suffers a significant deformation after storage, with the fidelity of memory only 6.3%, which cannot be applied for light information processing because the information is lost during storage
We have carried out a detailed investigation on the formation, propagation, and storage of ultraslow weak-light bullets and vortices via Rydberg-EIT in a cold atomic gas
Summary
High-dimensional spatiotemporal optical solitons, alias light bullets (LBs) [1], are solitary nonlinear waves localized in m-spatial dimensions and one time axis m 1D; m 1, 2, 3. A commonly used approach for creating stable 3 1D LBs is to exploit local and nonlocal optical nonlinearities with quite different response times. Recent theoretical [26] and experimental [27] studies revealed that strong and long-range optical nonlinearities can be built with Rydberg atoms [20,28,29], which are in electronically high-lying states with large principal quantum number n [30]. In conjunction with tunable dispersion and diffraction, this allows us to precisely control dynamics of LBs. To go beyond the commonly used mean-field theory [48,49,50,51,52], we derive a nonlinear 3 1D light propagation equation taking into account many-body correlations. It is different from that used in Ref. [51], where the Kerr nonlinearity in a quantum probe regime was studied for a 1 1D system, and no LBs or LVs or their storage and retrieval were considered
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