Squeezed-twin-beam generation in strongly absorbing media

Abstract: In this Letter we experimentally demonstrate the generation of squeezed, bright twin beams which arise due to competing gain and absorption, in a medium that is overall transparent. To accomplish this, we make use of a non-degenerate four-wave mixing process in warm potassium vapor, such that one of the twin beams experiences strong on-resonant absorption. At room temperature and above, due to Doppler broadening and smaller frequency detunings compared to other schemes, the ground state hyperfine splittings used in the present double-$\Lambda$ setup are completely overlapped. We show that despite the resulting significant asymmetric absorption of the twin beams, quantum correlations may still be generated. Our results also demonstrate that the simplified model of gain, followed by loss, is insufficient to describe the amount of quantum correlation resulting from the process.