Realizing single light bullets and vortices that are stable in high dimensions is a long-standing goal in the study of nonlinear optical physics. The storage and retrieval of such stable high-dimensional optical pulses may offer a variety of applications. Here, we present a scheme to generate such optical pulses in a cold Rydberg atomic gas. By virtue of electromagnetically induced transparency, strong, long-range atom–atom interaction in Rydberg states is mapped to light fields, resulting in a giant, fast-responding nonlocal Kerr nonlinearity and the formation of light bullets and vortices carrying orbital angular momenta, which have extremely low generation power and very slow propagation velocity, and can stably propagate, with the stability provided by the combination of local and nonlocal Kerr nonlinearities. We demonstrate that the light bullets and vortices obtained can be stored and retrieved in the system with high efficiency and fidelity. Our study provides a new route for manipulating high-dimensional nonlinear optical processes via controlled optical nonlinearities in cold Rydberg gases.

The well-known EIT-based storage and retrieval of optical pulses can be applied to nonlinear, solitonic pulses which have minimal dispersion.

It is challenging to probe ergodicity breaking trends of a quantum many-body system when dissipation inevitably damages quantum coherence originated from coherent coupling and dispersive two-body interactions. Rydberg atoms provide a test bed to detect emergent exotic many-body phases and nonergodic dynamics where the strong Rydberg atom interaction competes with and overtakes dissipative effects even at room temperature. Here, we report experimental evidence of a transition from ergodic toward ergodic breaking dynamics in driven-dissipative Rydberg atomic gases. The broken ergodicity is featured by the long-time phase oscillation, which is attributed to the formation of Rydberg excitation clusters in limit cycle phases. The broken symmetry in the limit cycle is a direct manifestation of many-body collective effects, which is verified experimentally by tuning atomic densities. The reported result reveals that Rydberg many-body systems are a promising candidate to probe ergodicity breaking dynamics, such as limit cycles, and enable the benchmark of nonequilibrium phase transition.

We investigate the optical Kerr nonlinearities of an ensemble of cold Rydberg atoms under the condition of electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT). By using an approach beyond mean-field theory, we show that the system possesses not only enhanced third-order nonlinear optical susceptibility, but also giant fifth-order nonlinear optical susceptibility, which has a cubic dependence on atomic density. Our results demonstrate that both the third-order and the fifth-order nonlinear optical susceptibilities consist of two parts, contributed respectively by photon-atom interaction and Rydberg-Rydberg interaction. The Kerr nonlinearity induced by the Rydberg-Rydberg interaction plays a leading role at high atomic density. We find that the fifth-order nonlinear optical susceptibility in the Rydberg-EIT system may be five orders of magnitude larger than that obtained in traditional EIT systems. The results obtained may have promising applications in light and quantum information processing and transmission at weak-light level.

We study dispersive optical nonlinearities of short pulses propagating in high number density, warm atomic vapors where the laser resonantly excites atoms to Rydberg $P$ states via a single-photon transition. Three different regimes of the light-atom interaction, dominated by either Doppler broadening, Rydberg atom interactions, or decay due to thermal collisions between ground state and Rydberg atoms, are found. We show that using fast Rabi flopping and strong Rydberg atom interactions, both in the order of gigahertz, can overcome the Doppler effect as well as collisional decay, leading to a sizable dispersive optical nonlinearity on nanosecond timescales. In this regime, self-induced transparency (SIT) emerges when areas of the nanosecond pulse are determined primarily by the Rydberg atom interaction, rather than the area theorem of interaction-free SIT. We identify, both numerically and analytically, the condition to realize Rydberg SIT. Our study contributes to efforts in achieving quantum information processing using glass cell technologies.

We propose a scheme to realize a giant Kerr nonlinearity and create stable high-dimensional nonlinear plasmon polaritons via plasmon-induced transparency (PIT) in a metamaterial, which is constructed by an array of unit cell consisting of a cut-wire and a pair of varactor-loaded split-ring resonators. We show that, due to the PIT effect and the nonlinearity contributed by the varactor, the system may possess very large second-order and third-order nonlinear susceptibilities. We further show that the system supports a resonant interaction between longwave and shortwave and hence effective third-order nonlinear susceptibility can be further enhanced one order of magnitude. Based on these peculiar properties, we derive Davey-Stewartson equations governing the evolution of longwave and shortwave envelope, and demonstrate that it possible to generate plasmon dromions [i.e., (2+1)-dimensional plasmon solitons with coupled longwave and shortwave components] with very low generation power. Our study raises the possibility for obtaining new, giant Kerr effect and stable high-dimensional nonlinear plasmon polaritons at very low radiation intensity by using nonlinear PIT metamaterials.