Influence of phase diffusion on atomic grating in a three-level ladder-type system in lower-level microwave-driven scheme

In this paper, we consider a scheme for electromagnetically induced grating (EIG) in a three-level ladder-type system. A microwave field of finite bandwidth making a standing-wave pattern is applied on lower levels. In addition, we have also introduced an indirect pump in our system. A weak probe field is then applied to study the effects of phase diffusion associated with the microwave control field on EIG. It is found that phase diffusion associated with the strong microwave control field strongly affect the diffraction. We have incorporated the effect of different system parameters such as the strength of the microwave field, indirect pumping mechanism, interaction length, and detuning in the weak probe field. Interestingly, the stronger microwave control field retrieves the loss in diffraction intensity caused by the phase diffusion. Our results show that the introduction of detuning in the optical probe field results in the enhancement of the phase grating effect. Furthermore, our results show that an optimized indirect pump field can slightly improve the first-order diffraction intensities both in the absence and presence of phase diffusion.