Electromagnetically induced transparency of a single-photon in dipole-coupled one-dimensional atomic clouds

TL;DR

This paper explores how a single photon propagates through two coupled atomic clouds under electromagnetically induced transparency, revealing mechanisms for photon transfer, filtering, and generalization to multiple clouds.

Contribution

It demonstrates photon transfer and filtering via dipole interactions in coupled atomic clouds and extends the analysis to multiple clouds with a novel free-particle mapping.

Findings

Photon can be partially transferred between clouds via dipole-dipole interaction.

Photon filtering can be achieved by exploiting dark and bright superpositions.

The dynamics in multiple clouds can be approximated as a free particle with complex mass.

Abstract

We investigate the propagation of a single photon under conditions of electromagnetically induced transparency in two parallel one-dimensional atomic clouds which are coupled via Rydberg dipole-dipole interaction. Initially the system is prepared with a single delocalized Rydberg excitation shared between the two ensembles and the photon enters both of them in an arbitrary path-superposition state. By properly aligning the transition dipoles of the atoms of each cloud we show that the photon can be partially transferred from one cloud to the other via the dipole-dipole interaction. This coupling leads to the formation of dark and bright superpositions of the light which experience different absorption and dispersion. We show that this feature can be exploited to filter the incident photon in such a way that only a desired path-superposition state is transmitted transparently. Finally, we generalize the analysis to the case of N coupled one-dimensional clouds. We show that within some approximations the dynamics of the propagating photon can be mapped on that of a free particle with complex mass.