Optical preparation and measurement of atomic coherence at gigahertz bandwidth

TL;DR

This paper presents a method for preparing and measuring atomic coherence in a dense medium using gigahertz bandwidth pulses, achieving near-perfect coherence preparation and non-invasive measurement.

Contribution

It introduces a novel high-bandwidth pulse scheme for atomic coherence preparation and a non-invasive measurement technique, with numerical validation of high efficiency.

Findings

Preparation efficiency close to unity

Non-invasive measurement of coherence

Effective at gigahertz bandwidths

Abstract

We detail a method for the preparation of atomic coherence in a high density atomic medium, utilising a coherent preparation scheme of gigahertz bandwidth pulses. A numerical simulation of the preparation scheme is developed, and its efficiency in preparing coherent states is found to be close to unity at the entrance to the medium. The coherence is then measured non-invasively with a probe field.