Slow light produced by stimulated Raman scattering in solid hydrogen

Summary form only given. Recently, considerable attention has been drawn to extremely slow light obtained in the conditions of electromagnetically induced transparency. The reason is that slow light may lead to exceptionally large nonlinearities and, in particular, to efficient nonlinear processes at energies of a few photons per atomic cross section. Extremely low group velocities of light have been observed in resonant systems such as a Bose-Einstein condensate of ultracold sodium atoms or hot rubidium vapors. Meanwhile, there is a large number of nonlinear optical techniques based on nonresonant interaction. Therefore, it is desirable to study the possibility of slow light in far-off-resonance media. In the present work, we demonstrate experimentally that far-off-resonance stimulated Raman scattering in solid hydrogen driven by a strong coupling field allows us to slow down the intensity-peak velocity of the Stokes and antiStokes fields.