Dual-channel Transfer and Modulation of Optical Vortices in a Ladder-Type System

TL;DR

This paper introduces a dual-channel quantum system that enables controllable transfer and modulation of optical vortices, offering a new approach for advanced optical modulation and quantum information processing.

Contribution

It presents a novel symmetry-broken ladder-type three-level quantum system with dual channels for transferring and modulating optical vortices via three-wave mixing processes.

Findings

Output fields exhibit crescent and petal shapes.

Spatial distributions can be non-synchronously modulated.

Orbital angular momentum transfer shows periodic behavior.

Abstract

We propose a dual-channel closed-loop structure within a symmetry-broken ladder-type three-level quantum system, where each channel incorporates three-wave mixing (TWM) processes. This system enables the transfer of optical vortices from either the strong control field or the weak input probe field to the TWM-generated fields in the channel. As a result, the two resultant output optical fields exhibit unique spatial distributions, such as crescent and petal shapes, which can be non-synchronously modulated via adjusting the intensity and frequency of the control field. The orbital angular momentum transfer dynamics and multi-angle spatial distribution modulation of the output fields show periodic and non-synchronous characteristics via adjusting the control field due to the optical interference. Thus, this quantum system has great potential as a tunable optical modulator, which holds promise for applications in information technologies involving multi-channel processing and asymmetric tasks, especially in advanced optical modulation and quantum state manipulation in quantum information processing.