Propagation of coupled dark-state polaritons and storage of light in a tripod medium

Abstract

We consider the slow light propagation in an atomic medium with a tripod level scheme. We show that the coexistence of two types of dark-state polaritons leads to the propagation dynamics, which is qualitatively different from that in a $\Lambda$-medium, and allows therefore for very efficient conversion of signal photons into spin excitations. This efficiency is shown to be very close to 1 even for very long signal light pulses, which could not be entirely compressed into a Lambda-medium at a comparable strength of the control field.

7 pages, 3 eps figures, final version published in Phys. Rev. A

References in corpus (6)

• Magneto-optical rotation and cross-phase modulation via coherently driven tripod atoms
• Resonance beating of light stored using atomic spinor polaritons
• Experimental demonstration of spinor slow light
• Beam splitting and Hong-Ou-Mandel interference for stored light
• Modulation of single-photon-level wave packets with two-component electromagnetically induced transparency
• Many-body physics of slow light

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Electromagnetically induced transparency and nonlinear pulse propagation in a combined tripod and $\Lambda$ atom-light coupling scheme