Related papers: Slow-light pulses in moving media
We analyze the propagation of fast-light pulses through a finite-length resonant gain medium both analytically and numerically. We find that intrinsic instabilities can be avoided in attaining a substantial peak advance with an ultra-short…
When a light bulb is turned on, light moves away from it at speed $c$, by definition. When light from this bulb illuminates a surface, however, this illumination front is not constrained to move at speed $c$. A simple proof is given that…
Backflow is a counter-intuitive phenomenon in which a forward propagating quantum particle propagates locally backwards. The actual counter-propagation property associated with this delicate interference phenomenon has not been observed to…
Two-dimensional images carried by optical pulses (2 ns) are delayed by up to 10 ns in a 10 cm cesium vapor cell. By interfering the delayed images with a local oscillator, the transverse phase and amplitude profiles of the images are shown…
The numerical simulations of an ultrashort pulse propagation in a one-dimensional nonlinear photonic crystal are carried out. It is known that the relaxation of cubic nonlinearity is the reason for the effect of pulse self-trapping in such…
We show that light pulses can be stopped and stored all-optically, with a process that involves an adiabatic and reversible pulse bandwidth compression occurring entirely in the optical domain. Such a process overcomes the fundamental…
In a recent article [R. R. Alfano and D. A. Nolan, Opt. Commun. 361 (2016) 25] the group velocity reduction below the speed of light in the case of certain Bessel beam pulses has been considered and an idea of its application for a natural…
We explore the nature of the classical propagation of light through media with strong frequency-dependent dispersion in the presence of a gravitational field. In the weak field limit, gravity causes a redshift of the optical frequency,…
Slow light in photonic crystals and other periodic structures is associated with stationary points of the photonic dispersion relation, where the group velocity of light vanishes. We show that in certain cases, the vanishing group velocity…
We investigate the propagation of light with ultra low group velocity in a Bose-Einstein condensate where the phase is not uniform. The light is shown to couple strongly to the phase gradient of the condensate. The interaction between the…
Observations and theoretical principles suggest that electromagnetic waves, including light, travel more slowly in dielectric media than in vacuum. Maxwell's equations, incorporating material dependent permittivity and permeability,…
A moving dielectric medium acts as an effective gravitational field on light. One can use media with extremely low group velocities [Lene Vestergaard Hau et al., Nature 397, 594 (1999)] to create dielectric analogs of astronomical effects…
When a negative slope of the dispersion curve is encountered, the propagating light may be either 'fast light' or 'backward propagating'. We show that causality considerations select only one of which for each scenario, and demonstrate that…
The group velocity of gravitational waves in a flat Friedman-Robertson-Walker universe is investigated. For plane waves with wavelength well inside the horizon, and a universe filled with an ideal fluid with the pressure to density ratio…
Diffraction limits the behaviour of light in optical systems and sets the smallest achievable line width at half the wavelength. With a novel subwavelength plasmonic lens to reduce the diffraction via an asymmetry and to generate and…
We demonstrate the simultaneous propagation of slow- and fast-light optical pulses in a four-wave mixing scheme using warm potassium vapor. We show that when the system is tuned such that the input probe pulses exhibit slow-light group…
We theoretically study the propagation through a resonant absorbing medium of a time-dependent perturbation modulating the amplitude of a continuous wave (cw). Modeling the medium as a system of two-level atoms and linearizing the…
A plane monochromatic wave propagates in vacuum at the velocity of c. However, wave packets limited in space and time are used to transmit energy and information. Here it has been shown based on the wave approach that the on-axis part of…
We propose a method for slowing down light pulses by using composites doped with metal nanoparticles. The underlying mechanism is related to the saturable absorption near the plasmon resonance in a pump-probe regime, leading to strong…
We observe the dynamics of pulse trapping in a microstructured fiber. Few-cycle pulses create a system of two pulses: a Raman shifting soliton traps a pulse in the normal dispersion regime. When the soliton approaches a wavelength of zero…