# Stable single light bullets and vortices and their active control in cold Rydberg gases

## TL;DR

This paper demonstrates the generation, stability, and active control of high-dimensional light bullets and vortices in cold Rydberg gases, with potential applications in optical information processing.

## Contribution

It introduces a scheme to produce stable high-dimensional optical pulses in Rydberg gases using electromagnetically induced transparency and nonlocal Kerr nonlinearities.

## Key findings

- Stable propagation of light bullets and vortices with low power
- High-efficiency storage and retrieval of optical pulses
- Control over high-dimensional nonlinear optical processes

## Abstract

Realizing single light bullets and vortices that are stable in high dimensions is a long-standing goal in the study of nonlinear optical physics. On the other hand, the storage and retrieval of such stable high dimensional optical pulses may offer a variety of applications. Here we present a scheme to generate such optical pulses in a cold Rydberg atomic gas. By virtue of electromagnetically induced transparency, strong, long-range atom-atom interaction in Rydberg states is mapped to light fields, resulting in a giant, fast-responding nonlocal Kerr nonlinearity and the formation of light bullets and vortices carrying orbital angular momenta, which have extremely low generation power, very slow propagation velocity, and can stably propagate, with the stability provided by the combination of local and the nonlocal Kerr nonlinearities. We demonstrate that the light bullets and vortices obtained can be stored and retrieved in the system with high efficiency and fidelity. Our study provides a new route for manipulating high-dimensional nonlinear optical processes via the controlled optical nonlinearities in cold Rydberg gases.