Related papers: Saturable absorption or slow light?
We consider the phase stability of a local oscillator (or laser) locked to a cavity QED system comprised of atoms with an ultra-narrow optical transition. The atoms are cooled to millikelvin temperatures and then released into the optical…
Rotating axisymmetric objects amplify incoming waves by superradiant scattering. When enclosed in a cavity, the repeated interaction of a confined field with the object may trigger superradiant instabilities. Rotating binaries are…
We discuss the prospects for enhancing absorption and scattering of light from a weakly coupled atom in a high-finesse optical cavity by adding a medium with large, positive group index of refraction. The slow-light effect is known to…
The observations reported by Franke-Arnold et al (SCIENCE Reports, 1 July 2011 p. 65) do not provide evidence of slow light enhanced rotary photon drag as claimed, but arise from well-known saturable absorption phenomena consistent with the…
Concepts of high precision studies of the one-way speed of light anisotropy are discussed. The high energy particle beam allows measurement of a one-way speed of light anisotropy (SOLA) via analysis of the beam momentum variation with…
Experiments with cold atoms trapped in optical lattices offer the potential to realize a variety of novel phases but suffer from severe spatial inhomogeneity that can obscure signatures of new phases of matter and phase boundaries. We use a…
Opaque scintillators are designed to have a short scattering length such that scintillation photons are probabilistically confined to a small region of space about their origin. The benefit of this feature is that information on the…
Coherent virtual absorption (CVA) is a recently-introduced phenomenon for which exponentially growing waves incident onto a conservative optical medium are neither reflected nor transmitted, at least transiently. CVA has been associated to…
We have studied stationary and quasi-stationary signal light pulses in cold lambda-type atomic media driven by counterpropagating control laser fields at the condition of electromagnetically induced transparency. By deriving a dispersion…
In recent years, ultrafast pump-probe spectroscopy has provided insightful information about nonequilibrium dynamics of excitations in materials. In a typical experiment of time-resolved x-ray absorption spectroscopy, the systems are…
We revisit the calculation of bosonic dark matter absorption via electronic excitations. Working in an effective field theory framework and consistently taking into account in-medium effects, we clarify the relation between dark matter and…
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…
Observable scattering processes entail emission-absorption of soft photons. As these degrees of freedom go undetected, some information is lost. Whether some of this information can be recovered in the observation of the hard photons,…
Optical limiters transmit low-level radiation while blocking electromagnetic pulses with excessively high energy (energy limiters) or with excessively high peak intensity (power limiters). A typical optical limiter absorbs most of the…
Thanks to the atomic coherence in coupling laser driven atomic system, sub-Doppler absorption has been observed in Doppler-broadened cesium vapor cell via the /Lambda-type three-level scheme. The linewidth of the sub-Doppler absorption peak…
In a recent work, Y.D. Chong et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 105}, 053901 (2010)] proposed the idea of a coherent perfect absorber (CPA) as the time-reversed counterpart of a laser, in which a purely incoming radiation pattern is completely…
The slow light effects of an amplitude modulated Gaussian (AMG) pulse in a cesium atomic vapor are presented. In a single-$\Lambda$ type electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) medium, more severe distortion is observed for an AMG…
When an electromagnetic wave is obliquely incident on an inhomogeneous high density plasma, it will be absorbed resonantly as long as it is polarized in the plane of incidence and has an electric field component along the plasma electron…
Photoinduced biological processes occur via one photon absorption in natural light, which is weak, CW and incoherent, but are often studied in the laboratory using pulsed coherent light. Here we compare the response of a molecule to these…
The resonant absorption of light by an ensemble of absorbers decreases when the resonance is inhomogeneously broadened, as only a fraction of the ensemble contributes to the absorption at any given optical frequency. Recovering the lost…