Noise suppression by differential detection of simultaneous electromagnetically induced transparency and absorption in counterpropagating bichromatic light

Well-established electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) and absorption (EIA) have been applied to various applications including quantum computing, light storage, and precision measurement. Here, we propose and implement a differential detection scheme based on coexisting EIT and EIA signals in a double-Lambda system with counterpropagating bichromatic laser fields, in which a differential coherent population trapping (diff-CPT) signal is extracted with a desired enhanced amplitude and highly suppressed common-mode noise. Compared to that of either EIT or EIA, the observed signal-to-noise ratio of the proposed method's diff-CPT signal improved by one order of magnitude, which would benefit the implementation of high-performance CPT clocks. This technique may also be applied to magnetometers and precision spectroscopy.