AbstractsAstronomy & Space Science

Coherent control and manipulation of classical or quantum light via nonlocal effects

by Lida Zhang




Institution: Universität Heidelberg
Department: The Faculty of Physics and Astronomy
Degree: PhD
Year: 2015
Record ID: 1106532
Full text PDF: http://www.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/archiv/18631


Abstract

The thesis is devoted to the theoretical studies of coherent control and manipulation of classical or quantum light via nonlocal effects. At the classical level, controllable light propagation dynamics in the paraxial regime is investigated. The specific type of nonlocal linear effects induced in thermal atomic vapor is explored to achieve diffraction-less and lossless propagation, uniform phase modulation, and frequency conversion with diffractionless image duplication for laser beams with arbitrarily encoded spatial profiles. Next, the study is extended to investigate propagation dynamics in the presence of nonlocal nonlinear effects generated in thermal interacting Rydberg atoms, which mainly reveals simultaneous competition between the nonlocal nonlinear absorption and the modulational instability for each wave component. Moreover, parity-time (PT) sym- metric dynamics in cold Rydberg atoms are exploited, and it is shown that a phase transition from unbroken to broken PT symmetry can be induced by nonlocal nonlinear effects. At the quantum level, it is further proposed to test the quantum nonlocality of single x-ray photons in a system where very weak x-ray pulses interact with 57 Fe nuclei in a thin cavity, such that a Bell-like inequality in the single-photon version is violated. All these proposals are feasible in current experimental settings.