Dispersive optical nonlinearities in an EIT-Rydberg medium

Abstract

We investigate dispersive optical nonlinearities that arise from Rydberg excitation blockade in cold Rydberg gases. We consider a two-photon transition scheme and study the non-linear response to a weak optical probe in presence of a strong control beam. For very low probe fields, the dominant nonlinearities are of the third order and they can be exactly evaluated in a steady state regime. In a more general case, the change in average atomic populations and coherences due to Rydberg interactions can be characterized by properly defined scaling parameters, which are generally complex numbers but in certain situations take the usual meaning of the number of atoms in a blockade sphere. They can be used in a simple "universal scaling" formula to determine the dispersive optical nonlinearity of the medium. We also develop a novel technique to account for the Rydberg interaction effects, by simplifying the treatment of nonlocal interaction terms, the so-called collisional integrals. We find algebraic relations that only involve two-body correlations, which can be solved numerically. All average populations and coherences are then obtained straightforwardly.

9 pages, 4 figures

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• Enhanced third-order and fifth-order Kerr nonlinearities in a cold atomic system via Rydberg-Rydberg interaction
• Quantum statistics of light transmitted through an intracavity Rydberg medium
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• Rydberg-induced optical nonlinearities from a cold atomic ensemble trapped inside a cavity
• Giant Kerr nonlinearities and magneto-optical rotations in a Rydberg-atom gas via double electromagnetically induced transparency
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• Electromagnetically Induced Transparency of Interacting Rydberg Atoms with Two-Body dephasing
• Two-Color Optical Nonlinearity in an Ultracold Rydberg Atom Gas Mixture
• Quantum Reflections of Nonlocal Optical Solitons in a Cold Rydberg Atomic Gas
• Two photon conditional phase gate based on Rydberg slow light polaritons
• Few-body quantum physics with strongly interacting Rydberg polaritons
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