Quantum control of dispersion in electromagnetically induced transparency via interacting dressed ground states

We offer a general treatment of electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) in a five level system consisting of four metastable ground states. Two additional rf-microwave fields coherently couple the two ground states of the standard EIT Lambda atom to a pair of additional hyperfine states in the ground state manifold, generating two sets of dressed states that interact via the probe and control lasers, which couple to the electronic excited state. These new hyperfine dressed states manifest themselves in the linear optical susceptibility of the probe as new resonances in addition to the Autler-Townes doublet characteristic of EIT. In particular, we show that the existence of two new narrow resonances, whose width are limited only by ground state decoherence, appear inside the normal EIT transparency window. We show that by controlling the intensity of these rf-microwave fields, one can engineer both the position and width of these narrow resonances and thereby exercise additional control over both the dispersion and group velocity of the probe.