CPM Seminar

Slow-light solitons

Ilya Vadeiko

Department of Physics
McGill University

Light, which normally travels at a speed of 300 million metres per second in a vacuum, has been slowed down to speeds of metres per second. Furthermore, it was shown that the light can be brought to a complete halt and stored in a medium. The experiments exploit changes in the refractive index of an optical medium caused by quantum interference effects such as “electromagnetically induced transparency” or “coherent population oscillations”. Recently, IBM scientists demonstrated that the group velocity of slow-light pulse can be controlled on a tiny chip with photonic crystal waveguides, manufactured with standard nanoelectronic fabrication technology. Their achievement represents a big advance toward the eventual use of light in place of electricity, potentially leading to a realization of fundamental optical elements for computers and other modern technologies.

In this talk, I will describe the dynamics and properties of slow-light soliton, which is a shape preserving light pulse revealing some remarkable features of the nonlinear slow-light problem. It will be shown that the group velocity of the soliton can be effectively controlled by the intensity of auxiliary laser field. The solitons have all the properties necessary to construct so called optical gates and optical memory. In the end of the presentation, I will discuss an interesting relation between the slow-light model and the dilaton theory of black holes.