Interplay of electromagnetically induced transparency and Doppler broadening in hot atomic vapors

Abstract

For multi-level systems in hot atomic vapors the interplay between the Doppler shift due to atomic motion and the wavenumber mismatch between driving laser fields strongly influences transmission and absorption properties of the atomic medium. In a three-level atomic ladder-system, Doppler broadening limits the visibility of electromagnetically-induced transparency (EIT) when the probe and control fields are co-propagating, while EIT is recovered under the opposite condition of counter-propagating geometry and $k_\mathrm{p} \lt k_\mathrm{c}$ , with $k_\mathrm{p}$ and $k_\mathrm{c}$ being the wavenumbers of the probe and control fields, respectively. This effect has been studied and experimentally demonstrated as an efficient mechanism to realize non-reciprocal probe light transmission, which may enable applications as magnetic-field free optical isolators. Here, we describe the basics of this effect and discuss a simple picture for the underlying mechanism. We illustrate how the non-reciprocity scales with wavelength mismatch and show how to experimentally demonstrate the effect in a simple Rydberg-EIT system using thermal Rubidium atoms.

Keywords

• atomic physics
• EIT
• tutorial
• nonreciprocal optics
• atomic vapor
• electromagnetically induced transparency