Polarization effects in electromagnetically induced transparency

We demonstrate the magnitude dependence of electromagnetically induced transparency, in a three-level cascade scheme in rubidium, on the probe and coupling field polarizations. We show that this dependence is due to the presence of the degenerate magnetic sublevels and the strengths of their relative dipole matrix elements. It is shown that this can lead to modified absorption profiles when electromagnetically induced transparency is used for spectroscopic purposes. We present theory that is in good agreement with our experiments.