Abstract

We study the propagation of coherent light pulses in a medium of three-level atoms with degenerate ground- and excited-state sublevels in an electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT)-type configuration. Both the strong control field and the weak probe pulse have elliptical polarization, which gives rise to concurrent multipath couplings between the ground-state sublevels and the auxiliary stable state. We derive the probe field susceptibility and show that in general, the probe field propagates in two separate polarization modes, one of which is attenuated, the other of which displays EIT. This generic result is valid provided the atomic medium is prepared to be in a pure quantum state over the ground-state sublevels initially. We also investigate the case when the initial state of the medium is described by an incoherent mixture of ground-state sublevels and show how EIT-like pulse propagation degrades. The possibility of controlling the probe susceptibility matrix with control field polarization provides a convenient tool for probing the quantum state of the medium on the degenerate ground-state sublevels.

© 2013 Optical Society of America

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