Controlled light-pulse propagation in driven color centers in diamond

Inhomogeneously broadened optical transitions of nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond may be employed to attain fully developed photonic band-gap structures with negligible absorption via coherent optical nonlinearities. For realistic material parameters, the resulting band gap may be tuned via the coupling field to acquire reflectivities very close to unity and sufficiently large bandwidths. We anticipate that this can be used to optically control with remarkable experimental simplicity the reflected and transmitted parts of an incident light pulse.