Stationary Light Pulses in Cold Atomic Media

Abstract

Stationary light pulses (SLPs), i.e., light pulses without motion, are formed via the retrieval of stored probe pulses with two counter-propagating coupling fields. We show that there exist non-negligible hybrid Raman excitations in media of cold atoms that prohibit the SLP formation. We experimentally demonstrate a method to suppress these Raman excitations and realize SLPs in laser-cooled atoms. Our work opens the way to SLP studies in cold as well as in stationary atoms and provides a new avenue to low-light-level nonlinear optics.

4 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (2)

• Stationary pulses of light in an atomic medium
• Mapping photonic entanglement into and out of a quantum memory

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Coherent Optical Memory with High Storage Efficiency and Large Fractional Delay
• Slow polaritons with orbital angular momentum in atomic gases
• Optical vortices of slow light using tripod scheme
• Two-color quantum memory in double Λ-media
• Master equation approach for interacting slow- and stationary-light polaritons
• Light pulse in $\Lambda$-type cold atomic gases