Storage Of Airy Light Beams Based On Electromagnetically Induced Transparency

In recent years,an Airy beam is described by the Airy function has received a lot of interest.It was first demonstrated by Christodoulides and his co-workers in 2007.There are several remarkable properties,such as “self-accelerate” “diffraction-free” and “self-healing”.Self-accelerate means during propagation the beam's intensity profile remains invariant.Diffraction-free and self-healing has the meaning that during the propagation the beam can remain its shape,restore its initial form after being blocked by small obstacles.The Airy beam's unique properties are very useful for applications,such as optical micromanipulation,plasma guidance,autofocusing waves,and light bullets.Generated the Airy beam's traditional way is Imposing a cubic phase to a Gaussian beam by a linear spatial light modulator translate the modulated beam by a Fourier lens.Electromagnetically induced transparency(EIT)is an effective method to manipulate light beam.EIT means that the weak light signal passes through an opaque medium without absorption when an additional coupling field is used to produce quantum interference.EIT allows for a large range of light-matter interaction phenomena.In particular,EIT can be used to store a weak probe light.This EIT-based light storage is interpreted as dark-state polariton.Among the storage media,the atomic gas has diffusion phenomenon would cause the distortion of the retrieved image,so we chose the solid medium without atomic diffusion.Rare-earth-doped solids have attracted much attention,because it offers the spectrum properties of narrow spectrum line and long decoherence time,it will be very appropriate to store light pulse.There have been some interests in using EIT technique to manipulate the propagation of Airy beams.Some related theoretical and experimental works have been investigated.Coherent control of Airy beams is important for further light beam manipulation and information processing.In this paper,we experimentally investigate the storage and retrieval of a 2D Airy beam in a solid-state medium driven by electromagnetically induced transparency(EIT).Under EIT condition,the weak probe and strong control fields are applied to the experimental medium with a three-level lambda system.The transverse profile of the probe light carries a 2D Airy wave packet and its temporal shape is a Gaussian pulse.By switching off the control field,the probe Airy beam is stored into atomic spin coherence between two ground levels.The retrieved Airy beam keeps a high similarity compared with that before the storage.Furthermore,the self-healing property of the retrieved Airy beam is investigated.This storage of Airy beams develops the control method of Airy beams,which will be useful in further applications.