Phase-dependent transparency in a two-level system with applications to all-optical switching

The phenomenon of transparency, conventionally studied in three and higher level atomic systems, is extended to the case of a two-level system (TLS), where we use a semiclassical framework to describe the transparent propagation of classical fields in a medium of TLS scatterers. We demonstrate a new...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Aneesh Ramaswamy, Svetlana A. Malinovskaya
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Frontiers Media S.A. 2025-08-01
Series:Frontiers in Quantum Science and Technology
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Online Access:https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frqst.2025.1526469/full
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Summary:The phenomenon of transparency, conventionally studied in three and higher level atomic systems, is extended to the case of a two-level system (TLS), where we use a semiclassical framework to describe the transparent propagation of classical fields in a medium of TLS scatterers. We demonstrate a new form of transparency with fast pulses, accounting for the initial state of the TLS, which we call phase-dependent transparency. Using the phenomenon of photon locking, we showed that TLSs initialized in maximum coherence states exhibit transparency to resonant fields when there is phase-matching between the phase of the atomic coherence and that of the probe field. An application to the problem of all-optical switching is also discussed, where on-demand transmission is generated by controlling the relative phase between a π/2 pump pulse and the transmitted probe pulse.
ISSN:2813-2181