Abstract
We present a preliminary experimental study of optimized slow and stored light pulses in Rb vapor cells. We study the effciency of light storage as a function of pulse duration, storage time, retrieval field intensity, etc. We demonstrate a procedure based on time reversal for the optimization of the effciency for storage of light in atomic ensembles suggested in a recent theoretical paper [A.V. Gorshkov et al., e-print archive quant-ph/0604037 (2006)]. Experimental results are in a good qualitative agreement with theoretical calculations based on a simplified three-level model.
