All-optical steering of light via spatial Bloch oscillations in a gas of three-level atoms

Abstract

A standing-wave control field applied to a three-level atomic medium in a planar hollow-core photonic crystal waveguide creates periodic variations of linear and nonlinear refractive indexes of the medium. This property can be used for efficient steering of light. In this work we study, both analytically and numerically, the dynamics of probe optical beams in such structures. By properly designing the spatial dependence of the nonlinearity it is possible to induce long-living Bloch oscillations of spatial gap solitons, thus providing desirable change in direction of the beam propagation without inducing appreciable diffraction. Due to the significant enhancement of the nonlinearity, such self-focusing of the probe beam can be reached at extremely weak light intensities.

8 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (9)

• Efficient all-optical switching using slow light within a hollow fiber
• Low-Light-Level Optical Interactions with Rubidium Vapor in a Photonic Bandgap Fiber
• Precision frequency measurement of visible intercombination lines of strontium
• Trapping of Ultracold Atoms in a Hollow-core Photonic Crystal Fiber
• Long-living Bloch oscillations of matter waves in optical lattices
• Localized modes in arrays of boson-fermion mixtures
• Delocalizing transition in one-dimensional condensates in optical lattices due to inhomogeneous interactions
• Deflection of Slow Light by Magneto-Optically Controlled Atomic Media
• Rabi oscillations of matter wave solitons in optical lattices

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Solitons in nonlinear lattices
• Double symmetry breaking of solitons in one-dimensional virtual photonic crystals
• Steering, Splitting and Cloning of Optical Beam in a Coherently Driven Raman Gain System
• Quench Dynamics of Finite Bosonic Ensembles in Optical Lattices with Spatially Modulated Interactions
• Quasi-compactons in inverted nonlinear photonic crystals