摘要: An optical field will undergo coherent diffusion when it is mapped into
thermal-motioned atoms, e.g., in a slow or storage light process. As was
demonstrated before, such diffusion effect is equivalent to a spatial low-pass
filter attenuating the high spatial frequency (SF) components of the optical
field. Here, employing electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) based
light storage in hot atomic vapor, we demonstrate that the angular deviation
between the control and probe beams could be utilized as a degree of freedom to
modulate the SF of the probe beam. The principle is to change the
diffusion-induced low-pass filter into a band-pass filter, whose SF response
can be tuned by varying the direction and magnitude of the angular deviation.
Transverse multimode light fields, such as optical images and Laguerre-Gaussian
modes are utilized to study such SF modulation. Our findings could be broadly
applied to the fields of quantum information processing, all-optical image
manipulation and imaging through diffusive media.