Measurement of Dicke Narrowing in Electromagnetically Induced Transparency

Abstract

Dicke narrowing is a phenomena that dramatically reduces the Doppler width of spectral lines, due to frequent velocity-changing collisions. A similar phenomena occurs for electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) resonances, and facilitates ultra-narrow spectral features in room-temperature vapor. We directly measure the Dicke-like narrowing by studying EIT line-shapes as a function of the angle between the pump and the probe beams. The measurements are in good agreement with an analytic theory with no fit parameters. The results show that Dicke narrowing can increase substantially the tolerance of hot-vapor EIT to angular deviations. We demonstrate the importance of this effect for applications such as imaging and spatial solitons using a single-shot imaging experiment, and discuss the implications on the feasibility of storing images in atomic vapor.

Introduction revised

References in corpus (7)

• Storage of light in atomic vapor
• Nonlinear optics with stationary pulses of light
• Optical atomic coherence at the one-second time scale
• Investigation of microwave transitions and nonlinear magneto-optical rotation in anti-relaxation-coated cells
• Diffusion-induced Ramsey narrowing
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Cited by in corpus (15)

• Storing images in warm atomic vapor
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• Elimination, reversal, and directional bias of optical diffraction
• Theory of Thermal Motion in Electromagnetically Induced Transparency: Diffusion, Doppler, Dicke and Ramsey
• Elimination of the Diffraction of Arbitrary Images Imprinted on Slow Light
• Atomic vapor quantum memory for a photonic polarization qubit
• Coherent Diffusion of Polaritons in Atomic Media
• Image Storage in Hot Vapors
• Generation and delayed retrieval of spatially multimode Raman scattering in warm rubidium vapors
• Producing slow light in warm alkali vapor using electromagnetically induced transparency
• How to measure diffusional decoherence in multimode rubidium vapor memories?
• Dynamics of saturated Bragg diffraction in a stored light grating in cold atoms
• Coherent two-photon emission from hydrogen molecules excited by counter-propagating laser pulses
• Effects of thermal motion on electromagnetically induced absorption
• Spectroscopic Measurement of the Softness of Ultra-Cold Atomic Collisions