High-fidelity and controllable cloning of high-dimensional optical beams with a Rydberg atomic gas

High-fidelity and controllable optical cloning of high-dimensional (high-D) optical beams is very important for the development of novel techniques for optical imaging, lithography, and communications, etc. Here we propose a scheme to realize the cloning of high-D optical beams with a Rydberg atomic gas via electromagnetically induced transparency. We show that strong atom-atom interaction can map to two probe laser fields, which may acquire giant nonlocal Kerr nonlinearities supporting the formation of stable high-D optical solitons and vortices at very low light power. We also show that such optical solitons and vortices prepared in one probe field can be cloned onto another one with high fidelity, and the cloning may be actively manipulated through the tuning of the nonlocality degree of the Kerr nonlinearities. Moreover, we demonstrate that based on such a cloning scheme multitimes and multicomponents cloning of high-D optical beams are also possible, which allows us to acquire multiple copies of high-D optical beams. The results on the optical cloning reported here are not only of fundamental interest for nonlocal nonlinear optics but also promising for practical applications in optical information processing and transmission.