Kerr field induced tunable optical atomic waveguide

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel method for creating tunable optical waveguides using atomic vapor, leveraging control and Kerr fields to achieve high contrast refractive index modulation for efficient beam guiding.

Contribution

It introduces a new scheme combining control field transparency and Kerr absorption to generate adjustable optical waveguides in atomic vapor.

Findings

High contrast, tunable waveguides enable diffractionless propagation of probe beams.

Numerical simulations show effective guiding over several Rayleigh lengths.

Potential applications in high-resolution imaging and image processing.

Abstract

We propose an efficient scheme for the generation of tunable optical waveguide based on atomic vapor in N -type configuration. We exploit both control field induced transparency and Kerr field induced absorption to produce a flexible probe transparency window otherwise not feasible. We employ a suitable spatial profile of control and Kerr beams to create a high contrast refractive in- dex modulation that holds the key to guiding a weak narrow probe beam. Further we numerically demonstrate that high contrast tunable waveguide permits the propagation of different modes of probe beam to several Rayleigh lengths without diffraction. This efficient guiding of narrow opti- cal beam may have important applications in large density image processing, and high resolution imaging.