Ultraslow Propagation of Matched Pulses by Four-Wave Mixing in an Atomic Vapor

We have observed the ultraslow propagation of matched pulses in nondegenerate four-wave mixing in a hot atomic vapor. Probe pulses as short as 70 ns can be delayed by a tunable time of up to 40 ns with little broadening or distortion. During the propagation, a probe pulse is amplified and generates a conjugate pulse which is faster and separates from the probe pulse before getting locked to it at a fixed delay. The precise timing of this process allows us to determine the key coefficients of the susceptibility tensor. The fact that the same configuration has been shown to generate quantum correlations makes this system very promising in the context of quantum information processing.