Self-organized structures of two-component laser fields and their active controls in a cold Rydberg atomic gas

TL;DR

This paper explores how stationary optical patterns and solitons form and can be controlled in a cold Rydberg atomic gas using double electromagnetically induced transparency, revealing rich self-organized structures and phase transitions.

Contribution

It demonstrates the spontaneous formation and active control of diverse optical structures and phase transitions in Rydberg gases via nonlinear and nonlocal effects.

Findings

Spontaneous symmetry breaking leads to self-organized optical patterns.

Crossover from mixture to separation in polarization components occurs at a critical nonlinearity ratio.

Supports nonlocal two-component solitons and vortices under suitable conditions.

Abstract

We investigate the formation and control of stationary optical patterns in a cold Rydberg atomic gas via double electromagnetically induced transparency. We show that, through the modulational instability of plane-wave state of a laser field with two polarization components, the system undergoes a spontaneous symmetry breaking and hence the emergence of plentiful self-organized spatial optical structures, which can be manipulated by the ratio between the cross- and self-Kerr nonlinearities, the nonlocality degree of the Kerr nonlinearities, and the populations initially prepared in the two atomic ground states. Interestingly, a crossover from mixture to separation in space (optical phase separation) of the two polarization components occurs when the ratio between the cross- and self-Kerr nonlinearities exceeds a critical value. We also show that the system supports nonlocal two-component spatial optical solitons and vortices when the parameters of the system are selected suitably. The rich diversity and active controllability of the self-organized optical structures reported here provide a way for realizing novel optical patterns and solitons and their structural phase transitions based on Rydberg atomic gases.