Lateral and rotary light-drag enhancement in a vee+ladder configuration comprising a Rydberg state

Abstract

Abstract The lateral and rotary light-drag effects in a four-level vee+ladder configuration comprising a Rydberg state as the topmost level is theoretically investigated. We found that it is difficult to obtain enhanced lateral and rotary light drags accompanied by suppressed absorption in the three-level vee and ladder configurations. However, in the proposed four-level vee+ladder configuration both lateral and rotary light drags are significantly enhanced as well as suppressing the absorption of the weak probe field via electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT). The profound impacts of the intensity of the controlling fields on both the lateral and rotary light drags are discussed. It is demonstrated that intensifying the controlling fields leads to enhancing the lateral and rotary light-drag effects accompanied by negligible probe field absorption. Furthermore, it is shown that light is dragged opposite of the direction of the host medium motion while the superluminal light propagation dominates. Nevertheless, the light is dragged along the same direction of the host medium motion in the subluminal propagation condition. In addition, we present the real quantities of all the parameters used in this study for future empirical investigations.