《Light pulse in -type cold-atom gases》.pdf

PHYSICAL REVIEW A 81, 043403 (2010) Light pulse in -type cold-atom gases Ran Wei,1 Bo Zhao,2,3,* Youjin Deng,1,† Shuai Chen,1 Zeng-Bing Chen,1 and Jian-Wei Pan1 1Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at Microscale and Department of Modern Physics, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui 230026, People’s Republic of China 2Institute for Theoretical physics, University of Innsbruck, A-6020 Innsbruck, Austria 3Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information of the Austrian Academy of Science, A-6020 Innsbruck, Austria (Received 14 January 2010; published 12 April 2010) We investigate the behavior of the light pulse in -type cold-atom gases with two counter-propagating control lights with equal strength by directly simulating the dynamic equations and exploring the dispersion relation. Our analysis shows that, depending on the length L0 of the stored wave packet and the decay rate γ of ground-spin coherence, the recreated light can behave differently. For long L0 and/or large γ , a stationary light pulse is produced, while two propagating light pulses appear for short L0 and/or small γ . In the γ → 0 limit, the light always splits into two propagating pulses for a sufficiently long time. This scenario agrees with a recent experiment [Y.-W. Lin et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 102, 213601(2009)] where two propagating light pulses are generated in laser-cooled cold-atom ensembles. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevA.81.043403 PACS number(s): 32.80.Qk, 42.50.Gy