Optical Precursors with Self-induced Transparency

Bruno Macke (1) , Bernard Ségard (1)

1 PhLAM - Laboratoire de Physique des Lasers, Atomes et Molécules - UMR 8523

Optical Sommerfeld-Brillouin precursors significantly ahead of a main field of comparable amplitude have been recently observed in an opaque medium with an electromagnetically induced transparency window [Wei et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 103, 093602 (2009)]. We theoretically analyze in this paper the somewhat similar results obtained when the transparency is induced by the propagating field itself and we establish an approximate analytic expression of the time-delay of the main-field arrival, which fits fairly well the result obtained by numerically solving the Maxwell-Bloch equations.

Mots clés: Optical Precursors; Self-induced Transparency

Domaines: Optique [physics.optics]

Bruno Macke, Bernard Ségard. Optical Precursors with Self-induced Transparency. Physical Review A : Atomic, molecular, and optical physics [1990-2015], 2010, 81, pp.015803. ⟨10.1103/PhysRevA.81.015803⟩. ⟨hal-00428704v2⟩