Slow-light six-wave mixing at low light intensities

Phys Rev Lett. 2004 Aug 13;93(7):073601. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.93.073601. Epub 2004 Aug 10.

Abstract

We report an experimental study of resonant six-wave mixing in coherently prepared Rb atoms. Electromagnetically induced transparency in a four-level atomic system suppresses the linear susceptibility and enhances the nonlinear susceptibilities, which leads to the resonantly enhanced, slow-photon six-wave mixing at low light intensities. The light emission in the six-wave mixing process can be viewed as resulting from diffraction of slow light off a resonant nonlinear grating induced in the four-level system by a standing-wave pump field.