Abstract

The effect of enhanced dispersion with suppressed absorption due to optical coherence and quantum interference in multilevel atomic systems has attracted great attention in recent years.^1,2 Although many theoretical papers have been published on this subject, few experiments have been reported. Harris and co-workers demonstrated suppression of absorption in Pb atomic vapor with a coherent pumping field in a three-level cascade system.³ Recently, they performed an experiment to reduce group velocity of a laser pulse in the same multilevel system of Pb atomic vapor by inducing optical coherence between another transition that shares one level with the transition near resonance with the probe beam.⁴

© 1994 Optical Society of America