Laser Field Induced Birefringence and Enhancement of Magneto-optical Rotation∗

An initially isotropic medium, when subjected to either a magnetic field or a coherent field, can induce anisotropy in the medium and can cause the polarization of a probe field to rotate. Therefore the rotation of probe polarization, due to magnetic field alone, can be controlled efficiently with the use of a coherent control field. We demonstrate this enhancement of the magneto-optical rotation (MOR) of a linearly polarized light, by doing detailed calculations on a system with relevant transitions j = 0 ↔ j = 1 ↔ j = 0.