Spatio-spectral vector light created by optical activity in rubidium vapor

Abstract

We demonstrate a pump-probe scheme in which an atomic vapor is optically pumped with circularly polarized light and probed with a vector vortex beam. The pump induces a macroscopic magnetization in the medium, which gives rise to frequency-dependent circular dichroism and birefringence. The vortex probe, characterized by spatially varying polarization, maps this optical activity onto the spatial structure of the transmitted light, thereby generating correlations between the frequency, polarization, and spatial degrees of freedom. Measuring the intensity profile in a suitable polarization component then allows us to perform spatially resolved polarization spectroscopy. We demonstrate the translation of frequency shifts into an image rotation, observing on resonance a rotation in the order of 98 mrad per MHz. These findings may find applications in high-precision spectroscopy, magnetometry, and the generation of hybrid entanglement.