2003/06/09 by Iacopo Carusotto, Maurizio Artoni, M. Artoni +4 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Cold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein Condensates #Orbital Angular Momentum in Optics #Quantum optics and atomic interactions #cond-mat
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physreva.68.063819
arxiv created 2003/06/09 · openalex publication_date 2003/12/19 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
A light beam normally incident upon an uniformly moving dielectric medium is, in general, subject to bendings due to a transverse Fresnel-Fizeau light drag effect. In most familiar dielectrics, the magnitude of this bending effect is very small and hard to detect. Yet, the effect can be dramatically enhanced in strongly dispersive media where slow group velocities in the m/s range have been recently observed taking advantage of the electromagnetically induced transparency effect. In addition to the usual downstream drag that takes place for positive group velocities, we discuss a significant anomalous upstream drag which is expected to occur for negative group velocities. Furthermore, for sufficiently fast speeds of the medium, higher-order dispersion terms are found to play an important role and to be responsible for light propagation along curved paths or the restoration of the time and space coherence of an incident noisy beam. The physics underlying this class of slow-light effects is thoroughly discussed.