Coherent control of optical bistability in Rydberg electromagnetically-induced transparency atomic system

You-Lin Chuang^1*, Mehmet Emre Tasgin²

¹Physics Division, National Center for Theoretical Sciences, Hsinchu, Taiwan
²Institute of Nuclear Sciences, Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey

* Presenter:You-Lin Chuang, email:yloptics@cts.nthu.edu.tw

We study optical bistable behavior of a Rydberg electromagnetically-induced transparency (EIT) atomic medium in a unidirectional optical ring-cavity. With strong van del Waal (vdW) interactions between Rydberg atoms, both optical nonlinear dispersion and nonlinear absorption coefficients are greatly enhanced. Under the condition of two-photon on resonance, we show that probe one-photon detuning can change the phase of the third order nonlinear coefficient, which characterizes a dispersive optical bistable system. At the same time, we have observed the feature of scaling phenomena for optical bistabilities with the factors of coupling Rabi frequency and atomic density. Besides that, we also discuss the influence of the cavity detuning and the mirror transmission coefficient on the optical bistable behavior. The strong bistable behaviors provide the system to be a good ingredient for realizing all-optical logic gate devices in optical computing.

Keywords: Optics bistability, Rydberg EIT