Abstract:
Motivated by the need for optically controllable pulse delays for applications such as optical buffering, data synchronization, optical memory and signal processing, researchers sought to control the speed of a pulse light from its vacuum speed. A revolution in the field came when researchers at Stanford University in California realized that the slow-light effect can be preserved while the effects of absortion are simultaneously canceled using a coherent optical effect occurring in a gas of atoms that have three energy levels. Although this result was impressive, it indicated that slow light based on electromagnetically induced transparency requires that the material medium be a low-density atomic vapor or an impurity-doped solid maintained at low temperature. A recent experiment performed at the University of Rochester in New York established that slow light based on coherent population oscillations could be observed with the use of ruby. A more recent research targeted the development of materials with a much faster population recovery. For instance, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, and Texas A&M UNiversity in College Station observed slow light with a modulation bandwidth as large as 2.8 GHz in a semicondictor laser amplifier. Controllable slow-light delays due to stimulated Brillouin scattering in conventional telecommunication fibers were realized independently by two teams, one from Spain and another from the US.
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