Refractive index enhancement with vanishing absorption in an atomic vapor.

We report a proof-of-principle experiment where the refractive index of an atomic vapor is enhanced while maintaining vanishing absorption of the beam. The key idea is to drive alkali atoms in a vapor with appropriate control lasers and induce a gain resonance and an absorption resonance for a probe beam in a two-photon Raman configuration. The strength and the position of these two resonances can be manipulated by changing the parameters of the control lasers. By using the interference between these two resonances, we obtain an enhanced refractive index without an increase in the absorption.

Generation of high-power laser light with Gigahertz splitting.

We demonstrate the generation of two high-power laser beams whose frequencies are separated by the ground state hyperfine transition frequency in (87)Rb. The system uses a single master diode laser appropriately shifted by high frequency acousto-optic modulators and amplified by semiconductor tapered amplifiers. This produces two 1 W laser beams with a frequency spacing of 6.834 GHz and a relative frequency stability of 1 Hz. We discuss possible applications of this apparatus, including electromagnetically induced transparency-like effects and ultrafast qubit rotations.

Fast ground state manipulation of neutral atoms in microscopic optical traps.

We demonstrate Rabi flopping at MHz rates between ground hyperfine states of neutral 87Rb atoms that are trapped in two micron sized optical traps. Using tightly focused laser beams we demonstrate high fidelity, site specific Rabi rotations with cross talk on neighboring sites separated by 8 microm at the level of 10(-3). Ramsey spectroscopy is used to measure a dephasing time of 870 micros, which is approximately 5000 longer than the time for a pi/2 pulse.