Hamburg 2009 – scientific programme
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SYKM: Lichtausbreitung in kohärent präparierten Medien
SYKM 1: Lichtausbreitung in kohärent präparierten Medien I
SYKM 1.2: Invited Talk
Thursday, March 5, 2009, 14:30–15:00, VMP 6 HS-D
EIT and light storage in a Mott insulator — •Stefan Kuhr1, Ute Schnorrberger1, Stefan Trotzky1, Jeff Thompson1, Rami Pugatch2, Nir Davidson2, and Immanuel Bloch1 — 1ohannes-Gutenberg Universität, Institut für Physik, Staudingerweg 7, 55128*Mainz, Germany — 2Department of Physics of Complex Systems,* Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 76100,* Israel
We experimentally demonstrate electromagnetically induced transparency and light storage with ultracold 87Rb atoms in an optical lattice. Atoms in a Mott insulator (MI) state in a deep optical lattice with unity filling experience no collisional interaction and almost no diffusion. This results in ultralong light storage times of about 200 ms, to our knowledge the longest ever achieved in ultracold atomic samples. Using the differential light shift of a spatially inhomogeneous far detuned light field we imprint a "phase gradient" across the atomic sample, resulting in controlled angular redirection of the retrieved light pulse.
As an alternative to storing light pulses, one can directly create an atomic superposition state by applying an rf+microwave pulse. A subsequent turning-on of the coupling field leads to a creation of a probe field. Using this method we investigated the dependence of the coherence time as a function of dimensionality and lattice depth and monitored the evolution of the coherence between singly and doubly occupied sites in the MI.