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Light-Drag Enhancement by a Highly Dispersive Rubidium Vapor
Akbar Safari1, Israel De Leon1,2, Mohammad Mirhosseini3
1Department of Physics and Max Planck Centre for Extreme and Quantum Photonics, University of Ottawa, 25 Templeton Street, Ottawa, Ontario K1N 6N5, Canada.
Abstract:
The change in the speed of light as it propagates through a moving material has been a subject of study for almost two centuries. This phenomenon, known as the Fresnel light-drag effect, is quite small and usually requires a large interaction path length and/or a large velocity of the moving medium to be observed. Here, we show experimentally that the observed drag effect can be enhanced by over 2 orders of magnitude when the light beam propagates through a moving slow-light medium. Our results are in good agreement with the theoretical prediction, which indicates that, in the limit of large group indices, the strength of the light-drag effect is proportional to the group index of the moving medium.
