Light stops at exceptional points

Abstract

Almost twenty years ago the light was slowed down to less than $10^{-7}$ of its vacuum speed in a cloud of ultracold atoms of sodium. Upon a sudden turn-off of the coupling laser, a slow light pulse can be imprinted on cold atoms such that it can be read out and converted into photon again. In this process, the light is stopped by absorbing it and storing its shape within the atomic ensemble. Alternatively, the light can be stopped at the band edge in photonic-crystal waveguides, where the group speed vanishes. Here we extend the phenomenon of stopped light to the new field of parity-time (PT) symmetric systems. We show that zero group speed in PT symmetric optical waveguides can be achieved if the system is prepared at an exceptional point, where two optical modes coalesce. This effect can be tuned for optical pulses in a wide range of frequencies and bandwidths, as we demonstrate in a system of coupled waveguides with gain and loss.

5 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (9)

• Making Sense of Non-Hermitian Hamiltonians
• The physics of exceptional points
• Dynamically encircling exceptional points in a waveguide: asymmetric mode switching from the breakdown of adiabaticity
• Loss-induced suppression and revival of lasing
• Topological energy transfer in an optomechanical system with exceptional points
• Visualization of Branch Points in PT-Symmetric Waveguides
• Stationary pulses of light in an atomic medium
• Stopping Light All-Optically
• Dynamical Observations of Self-Stabilising Stationary Light

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