Refractive Index Enhancement with Vanishing Absorption in an Atomic Vapor

Abstract

We report a proof-of-principle experiment where the refractive index of an atomic vapor is enhanced while maintaining vanishing absorption of the beam. The key idea is to drive alkali atoms in a vapor with appropriate control lasers and induce a gain resonance and an absorption resonance for a probe beam in a two-photon Raman configuration. The strength and the position of these two resonances can be manipulated by changing the parameters of the control lasers. By using the interference between these two resonances, we obtain an enhanced refractive index without an increase in the absorption.

arXiv comment11 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (6)

• Storage of light in atomic vapor
• Dark-State Polaritons in Electromagnetically Induced Transparency
• Ultra-Slow Light and Enhanced Nonlinear Optical Effects in a Coherently Driven Hot Atomic Gas
• Tunable negative refraction without absorption via electromagnetically induced chirality
• Electromagnetically induced left-handedness in a dense gas of three level atoms
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• Zero absorption and large negative refractive index in a left-handed four-level atomic media
• Optically controllable photonic structures with zero absorption
• Controllable linear $\pi$-phase modulation in a thermal atom vapor without diffraction or absorption
• Continuously-tunable Cherenkov-radiation-based detectors via plasmon index control
• Enhanced index of refraction in four-wave mixing media
• Train of high-power femtosecond pulses: Probe wave in a gas of prepared atoms