Blockade-induced resonant enhancement of the optical nonlinearity in a Rydberg medium

TL;DR

This paper predicts a resonant enhancement of optical nonlinearity in a Rydberg medium due to a two-photon process, with potential for experimental observation through transmission measurements.

Contribution

It introduces a theoretical model for resonant nonlinear optical response in Rydberg gases, including explicit intermediate state dynamics and analytical susceptibility expressions.

Findings

Resonant enhancement occurs at two-photon resonance conditions.

Nonlinear absorption and dispersion show strong spatial and spectral dependence.

Proposes an experimental setup to observe the predicted resonance.

Abstract

We predict a resonant enhancement of the nonlinear optical response of an interacting Rydberg gas under conditions of electromagnetically induced transparency. The enhancement originates from a two-photon process which resonantly couples electronic states of a pair of atoms dressed by a strong control field. We calculate the optical response for the three-level system by explicitly including the dynamics of the intermediate state. We find an analytical expression for the third order susceptibility for a weak classical probe field. The nonlinear absorption displays the strongest resonant behavior on two-photon resonance where the detuning of the probe field equals the Rabi frequency of the control field. The nonlinear dispersion of the medium exhibits various spatial shapes depending on the interaction strength. Based on the developed model, we propose a realistic experimental scenario to observe the resonance by performing transmission measurements.