Magnetic response enhancement via electrically induced magnetic moments

Abstract

The realization of negative refraction in atomic gases requires a strong magnetic response of the atoms. Current proposals for such systems achieve an enhancement of the magnetic response by a suitable laser field configuration, but still rely on high gas densities. Thus further progress is desirable, and this requires an understanding of the precise mechanism for the enhancement. Therefore, here we study the magnetic and electric response to a probe field interacting with three-level atoms in ladder configuration. In our first model, the three transitions are driven by a control field and the electric and magnetic component of the probe field, giving rise to a closed interaction loop. In a reference model, the coherent driving is replaced by an incoherent pump field. A time-dependent analysis of the closed-loop system enables us to identify the different contributions to the medium response. A comparison with the reference system then allows one to identify the physical mechanism that leads to the enhancement. It is found that the enhancement occurs at so-called multiphoton resonance by a scattering of the coupling field and the electric probe field mode into the magnetic probe field mode. Based on these results, conditions for the enhancement are discussed.

12 pages, 8 figures

References in corpus (7)

• Demonstration of Near-Infrared Negative-Index Materials
• Tunable negative refraction without absorption via electromagnetically induced chirality
• Electromagnetically induced left-handedness in a dense gas of three level atoms
• Phase-dependent interaction in a 4-level atomic configuration
• Light propagation through closed-loop atomic media beyond the multiphoton resonance condition
• Phase-dependent light propagation in atomic vapors
• Phase correlation of laser waves with arbitrary frequency spacing

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Negative refraction with tunable absorption in an active dense gas of atoms
• Quantum Coherence and Correlations of optical radiation by atomic ensembles interacting with a two-level atom in microwave cavity
• Negative index of refraction in a four-level system with magnetoelectric cross coupling and local field corrections
• Atom- photon entanglement beyond the multi-photon resonance condition