The slow light hustle A critical review of a fashionable topic in modern optics

摘要

The slow-light effect, which implies reduction of the group velocity of light by many orders of magnitude, is considered to be one of the most exciting discoveries in quantum optics of the last decade. The physics underlying the effect is related to an extremely steep dispersion of the medium in a very narrow region of its transparency, while all the manifestations of the effect are usually reduced just to a small pulse delay. Perhaps this is the reason why, after the discovery of the slow-light effect, some of the simplest nonlinear phenomena associated with a retarded optical response have been implicitly revised and assigned to reduction of the light group velocity. In this lecture, a few examples of common inconsistencies in the area of the slow-light physics will be presented.