Short-pulse cross-phase modulation in an electromagnetically-induced-transparency medium

Electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) has been proposed as a way to greatly enhance cross-phase modulation, with the possibility of leading to few-photon-level optical nonlinearities [Schmidt and Imamoglu, Opt. Lett. 21, 1936 (1996)]. This enhancement grows as the transparency window width, Delta(EIT), is narrowed. Decreasing Delta(EIT), however, has been shown to increase the response time of the nonlinear medium. This suggests that, for a given pulse duration, the nonlinearity would diminish once the window width became narrower than this pulse bandwidth. We show that this is not the case: the peak phase shift saturates but does not decrease. We show that in the regimes of most practical interest-narrow EIT windows perturbed by short signal pulses-the enhancement offered by EIT is not only in the magnitude of the nonlinear phase shift but also in its increased duration. That is, for the case of signal pulses much shorter (temporally) than the inverse EIT bandwidth, the narrow window serves to prolong the effect of the passing signal pulse, leading to an integrated phase shift that grows linearly with 1/Delta(EIT); this continued growth of the integrated phase shift improves the detectability of the phase shift, in principle, without bound. For many purposes, it is this detectability which is of more interest than the absolute magnitude of the peak phase shift. We present analytical expressions based on a linear time-invariant model that accounts for the temporal behavior of the cross-phase modulation for several parameter ranges of interest. We conclude that in order to optimize the detectability of the EIT-based cross-phase shift, one should use the narrowest possible EIT window and a signal pulse that is as broadband as the excited-state linewidth and detuned by half a linewidth.