English

Photon lifetime in a cavity containing a slow-light medium

Optics 2015-05-27 v1 Quantum Physics

Abstract

We investigate experimentally the lifetime of the photons in a cavity containing a medium exhibiting strong positive dispersion. This intracavity positive dispersion is provided by a metastable helium gas at room temperature in the electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) regime, in which light propagates at a group velocity of the order of 10000 m/s. The results definitely prove that the lifetime of the cavity photons is governed by the group velocity of light in the cavity, and not its phase velocity.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1104.0158,
  title  = {Photon lifetime in a cavity containing a slow-light medium},
  author = {Thomas Lauprêtre and Cédric Proux and Rupamanjari Ghosh and Sylvain Schwartz and Fabienne Goldfarb and Fabien Bretenaker},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1104.0158},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

Accepted for publication in Optics Letters

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