Raman scattering in a four-level atomic system with hyperfine structure

We propose and analyse an efficient Raman scheme for suppressing the absorption of a weak probe beam in a typical four-level atomic system with a nearly hyperfine doublet structure of two higher-lying excited levels for the two cases of transient regime and steady-state process. For the transient process, using the numerical calculations by a nice MATHEMATICA code, we find that the magnitude of the probe absorption at line centre of the probe transition is small compared to the standard three-level atomic system based on electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT). In particular, our results show that the probe absorption can be completely eliminated under the condition of Raman resonance, i.e. we only require that two-photon detuning is zero within the range of the hyperfine two-level frequency gap for the case of the steady state. In contrast to the standard three-level EIT scheme, one of the key advantages of our four-level Raman scheme is that under the Raman resonance condition we can observe one transparency window without the need of exact vanishing of one- and two-photon detuning. As a consequence, the atomic hyperfine structure cannot be a hindrance for obtaining EIT.