Stable single light bullets and vortices and their active control in cold Rydberg gases

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 non-linearities. 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. Published by The Optical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.