%0 Journal Article %J Physical Review Letters %D 2007 %T Universal Approach to Optimal Photon Storage in Atomic Media %A Alexey V. Gorshkov %A Axel Andre %A Michael Fleischhauer %A Anders S. Sorensen %A Mikhail D. Lukin %X 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. %B Physical Review Letters %V 98 %8 2007/3/19 %G eng %U http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0604037v3 %N 12 %! Phys. Rev. Lett. %R 10.1103/PhysRevLett.98.123601