Driving light pulses with light in two-level media

Abstract

A two-level medium, described by the Maxwell-Bloch (MB) system, is engraved by establishing a standing cavity wave with a linearly polarized electromagnetic field that drives the medium on both ends. A light pulse, polarized along the other direction, then scatters the medium and couples to the cavity standing wave by means of the population inversion density variations. We demonstrate that control of the applied amplitudes of the grating field allows to stop the light pulse and to make it move backward (eventually to drive it freely). A simplified limit model of the MB system with variable boundary driving is obtained as a discrete nonlinear Schroedinger equation with tunable external potential. It reproduces qualitatively the dynamics of the driven light pulse.

References in corpus (6)

• Quantum Coherent Atomic Tunneling between Two Trapped Bose-Einstein Condensates
• Stationary pulses of light in an atomic medium
• Wannier functions analysis of the nonlinear Schrödinger equation with a periodic potential
• Manipulating Light Pulses via Dynamically Controlled Photonic Bandgap
• Nonlinear Tight-Binding Approximation for Bose-Einstein Condensates in a Lattice
• Standing and Moving Gap Solitons in Resonantly Absorbing Gratings

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• Gap soliton dynamics in an optical lattice as a parametrically driven pendulum
• Scattering of slow-light gap solitons with charges in a two-level medium
• Nonlinear All Optical Digital Amplification of the Light Pulse in Weakly Coupled Photonic Crystal Waveguides