Anomalous ring-down effects and breakdown of the decay rate concept in optical cavities with negative group delay

Abstract

Propagation of light pulses through negative group velocity media is known to give rise to a number of paradoxical situations that seem to violate causality. The solution of these paradoxes has triggered the investigation of a number of interesting and unexpected features of light propagation. Here we report a combined theoretical and experimental study of the ring-down oscillations in optical cavities filled with a medium with such a strongly negative frequency dispersion to give a negative round-trip group delay time. We theoretically anticipate that causality imposes the existence of additional resonance peaks in the cavity transmission, resulting in a non-exponential decay of the cavity field and in a breakdown of the cavity decay rate concept. Our predictions are validated by simulations and by an experiment using a room-temperature gas of metastable helium atoms in the detuned electromagnetically induced transparency regime as the cavity medium.

References in corpus (5)

• Electromagnetically induced transparency with single atoms in a cavity
• Demonstration of a Tunable-Bandwidth White Light Interferometer using Anomalous Dispersion in Atomic Vapor
• Cavity electromagnetically induced transparency and all-optical switching using ion Coulomb crystals
• Large negative and positive delay of optical pulses in coherently prepared dense Rb vapor with buffer gas
• Photon lifetime in a cavity containing a slow-light medium

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Quantum fluids of light
• Collective strong coupling of cold potassium atoms in a ring cavity
• Coherent control of group index and magneto-optical anisotropy in a multilevel atomic vapor
• Coherence time of a cold-atom laser below threshold
• Why material slow light does not improve cavity-enhanced atom detection