Dynamics of saturated Bragg diffraction in a stored light grating in cold atoms

We report on a detailed investigation of the dynamics and the saturation of a light grating stored in a sample of cold cesium atoms. We employ Bragg diffraction to retrieve the stored optical information impressed into the atomic coherence by the incident light fields. The diffracted efficiency is studied as a function of the intensities of both writing and reading laser beams. A theoretical model is developed to predict the temporal pulse shape of the retrieved signal and compares reasonably well with the observed results.