This paper presents an overview of slow light in semiconductor heterostructures. The focus of this paper is to provide a unified framework to summarize and compare various physical mechanisms of slow light proposed and demonstrated in the past few years. We expand and generalize the discussions on fundamental limitation of slow light and the delay–bandwidth product trade-off to include gain sys...

Slow light devices such as photonic crystal waveguides (PhCW) and coupled resonator optical waveguides (CROW) have much promise for optical signal processing applications and a number of successful demonstrations underpinning this promise have already been made. Most of these applications are limited by propagation losses, especially for higher group indices. These losses are caused by technolo...

In the framework of the nonlinear Λ model, propagation of solitons was analysed in atomic vapours and Bose-Einstein condensates. The complicated nonlinear interplay between fast and slow-light solitons in a Λ-type medium was shown to facilitate control of its optical transparency and formation of optical gates. An exact analytical description was given for the deceleration, stopping and revival...

We describe a new type of Fourier transform (FT) interferometer in which the tunable optical delay between the two arms is realized by using a continuously variable slow-light medium instead of a moving arm as in a conventional setup. The spectral resolution of such a FT interferometer exceeds that of a conventional setup of comparable size by a factor equal to the maximum group index of the sl...

Laboratory-based optical analogs of astronomical objects such as black holes rely on the creation of light with an extremely low or even vanishing group velocity (slow light). These brief notes represent a pedagogical attempt towards elucidating this extraordinary form of light. This paper is a contribution to the book Artificial Black Holes edited by Mario Novello, Matt Visser and Grigori Volo...

This work describes atomic processes which result from the greatly enhanced longitudinal gradient force which is inherent to the propagation of slow light. These processes are (1) ballistic atom motion and atom surfing, and (2) a type of local pondermotive nonlinearity or scattering which results from free-particle sinusoidal motion and the density variation caused by this motion.

As evidenced by this Volume, there has been a flurry of activity over the last decade on tailoring the dispersive properties of optical materials [1]. What has captured the attention of the research community were some of the early results on creating spectral regions of large normal dispersion [2–4]. Large normal dispersion results in extremely small group velocities, where the group velocity ...

We show experimentally that the effects of pulse delay and advancement usually ascribed to the "slow and fast light" under conditions of the coherent population oscillations (CPO) can be universally observed with incoherent light fields on objects with the pure-intensity nonlinearity. As a light source, we used an incandescent lamp and as objects for study, a photochromic glass and a thermochro...