Observation of coherent optical information storage in an atomic medium using halted light pulses

By Chien Liu, Z. Dutton, C. H. Behroozi, L. Hau. Nature, 2001

1,870 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Electromagnetically induced transparency is a quantum interference effect that permits the propagation of light through an otherwise opaque atomic medium; a ‘coupling’ laser is used to create the interference necessary to allow the transmission of resonant pulses from a ‘probe’ laser. This technique has been used to slow and spatially compress light pulses by seven orders of magnitude, resulting in their complete localization and containment within an atomic cloud. Here we use electromagnetically induced transparency to bring laser pulses to a complete stop in a magnetically trapped, cold cloud of sodium atoms. Within the spatially localized pulse region, the atoms are in a superposition state determined by the amplitudes and phases of the coupling and probe laser fields. Upon sudden turn-off of the coupling laser, the compressed probe pulse is effectively stopped; coherent information initially contained in the laser fields is ‘frozen’ in the atomic medium for up to 1 ms. The coupling laser is turned back on at a later time and the probe pulse is regenerated: the stored coherence is read out and transferred back into the radiation field. We present a theoretical model that reveals that the system is self-adjusting to minimize dissipative loss during the ‘read’ and ‘write’ operations. We anticipate applications of this phenomenon for quantum information processing.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4af5ffd90e73328f5b2de242761517ea2e9e66c2

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Citations in the corpus

Colloquium: Trapping and manipulating photon states in atomic ensembles (2003, methodology): “The experiment of Liu and co-workers (Liu et al., 2001) used a setup similar to that of the earlier slow light demonstration.”
Slowing and stopping light using an optomechanical crystal array (2010, background): “While these schemes have been demonstrated in a number of remarkable experiments [5, 6, 7, 8], they remain difficult to implement in a practical setting.”
Slow light in photonic crystals (2008, background): “A notable example of a system that exhibits strong material dispersion is electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) in a vapour or a solid at, in most cases, cryogenic temperature”
Plasmonic analogue of electromagnetically induced transparency at the Drude damping limit. (2009, background): “Associated with the enhanced transmission is a drastic modification of the dispersive properties of the medium, which enables light to be slowed down substantiall”
Coherent mixing of mechanical excitations in nano-optomechanical structures (2009, background): “We use two canonical systems, coupled microdisks and coupled photonic-crystal nanobeams, to show that the large optical stiffening introduced by the optical gradient force actuates significant coherent mixing of mechanical excitations, not only leading to renormalization of the mechanical modes, but”
Manipulating light with strongly modulated photonic crystals (2010, background): “This was demonstrated experimentally shortly after its proposal [305, 306].”
Electromagnetically induced transparency : Optics in coherent media (2005, background): “…if the coupling field and thus the group velocity is already very small, even an instantaneous switchoff would lead only to a loss of the very small electromagnetic component of the polariton Liu et al., 2001; Matsko, Rostovtsev, Kocharovskaya, et al., 2001; Fleischhauer and Mewes, 2002 .”
Multiphoton entanglement and interferometry (2008, background): “Long lifetimes for relevant coherence have been observed both in a room-temperature dilute atomic gas (Phillips et al., 2001) and in a sample of cold trapped atoms (Liu et al., 2001).”
Quantum interface between light and atomic ensembles (2008, background): “…it was quickly realized that reducing the group velocity to zero would enable an atomic memory for light (Fleischhauer and Lukin, 2000; Lukin et al., 2000) and the first experimental demonstrations of this for classical pulses have been presented by Liu et al. (2001); Phillips et al. (2001).”
Coherent Conversion Between Microwave and Optical Photons—An Overview of Physical Implementations (2019, positive): “Coherent Raman scattering in such a set of states can allow for controllable non-linearity, leading to the demonstration of electromagnetically induced transparency [107, 108], slow light [109, 110] and storage of light [111, 112].”