Nonlinear magneto-optical rotation of elliptically polarized light RID A-1272-2007 RID B-9041-2008

Journals published by the American Physical Society can be found at http://publish.aps.org/We predict theoretically and demonstrate experimentally an ellipticity-dependent nonlinear magneto-optic rotation of elliptically polarized light propagating in a medium with atomic coherence. We show that this effect results from hexadecapole and higher-order moments of the atomic coherence, and is associated with an enhancement of Kerr and higher-order nonlinearities accompanied by suppression of the other linear and nonlinear susceptibility terms of the medium. These nonlinearities might be useful for quantum signal processing. In particular, we report an observation of enhancement of the polarization rotation of elliptically polarized light resonant with the 5S(1/2)F=2-->5P(1/2)F=1 transition of Rb-87