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Updated: Feb 19, 2026

Measurement of X-ray Beam Coherence along Multiple Directions Using 2-D Checkerboard Phase Grating
Published on: October 11, 2016
Asymmetric light diffraction of an atomic grating with PT symmetry
Abstract:
Cold atoms trapped in one-dimensional optical lattices and driven to the four-level N configuration are exploited for achieving an electromagnetically induced grating with parity-time-symmetry. This nontrivial grating exhibits unidirectional diffraction patterns, e.g., with incident probe photons diffracted into either negative or positive angles, depending on the sign relation between spatially modulated absorption and dispersion coefficients. Such asymmetric light diffraction is a result of the out-of-phase interplay of amplitude and phase modulations of transmission function and can be easily tuned via optical depth, probe detuning, pump Rabi frequencies, etc.
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