Dynamical control of pulse propagation in electromagnetically induced transparency

The influence of a phase-modulated control field on the phenomenon of electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) is investigated theoretically. We show that the phase modulation changes the dispersive properties of the medium considerably since it results in temporal oscillations of the transparency window in frequency space. This is in marked contrast to the standard EIT setup, where the transparency window is fixed and determined by the two-photon resonance condition. In particular, we find that the phase modulation enables the propagation of probe pulses with disjoint frequency spectra at different times and allows the shifting of the central frequency of a probe pulse almost without distortion of its shape. We employ the time-dependent susceptibility of the medium to explain and analyze our results and demonstrate that this concept yields qualitative as well as quantitative agreement with the numerical integration of Maxwell-Bloch equations. Our theoretical model can be applied to other media with time-dependent susceptibilities.