TY - JOUR T1 - Universal Approach to Optimal Photon Storage in Atomic Media JF - Physical Review Letters Y1 - 2007 A1 - Alexey V. Gorshkov A1 - Axel Andre A1 - Michael Fleischhauer A1 - Anders S. Sorensen A1 - Mikhail D. Lukin AB - We present a universal physical picture for describing storage and retrieval of photon wave packets in a Lambda-type atomic medium. This physical picture encompasses a variety of different approaches to pulse storage ranging from adiabatic reduction of the photon group velocity and pulse-propagation control via off-resonant Raman fields to photon-echo based techniques. Furthermore, we derive an optimal control strategy for storage and retrieval of a photon wave packet of any given shape. All these approaches, when optimized, yield identical maximum efficiencies, which only depend on the optical depth of the medium. VL - 98 UR - http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0604037v3 CP - 12 J1 - Phys. Rev. Lett. U5 - 10.1103/PhysRevLett.98.123601 ER -