Pressure- and temperature-dependent photon echo results are obtained for pentacene doped polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA). A unique pressure effect is observed in which the optical dephasing rate increases as the pressure is increased from ambient pressure to 4 kbar, above which the optical dephasing rate is pressure independent up to 43 kbar. The present results are also compared with pressure- and temperature-dependent photon echo results for rhodamine 101 in PMMA, in which the optical dephasing rate was completely insensitive to pressure over the range 0 to 30 kbar. A negative correlation is also observed between the optical dephasing rate and the spectral hole burning efficiency. Line broadening due to pressure induced spectral diffusion may be responsible for both the increased dephasing rate and the reduced spectral hole-burning at high pressure.
Resonant excitation of an inhomogeneously broadened ensemble of two-level atoms (TLA) by a stochastic field with phase noise is theoretically investigated. Free-induction decay (FID), hole burning (HB), and transient nutation (TN) are studied. We consider two kinds of driving fields, one with a free walking phase and another with the phase locked in a limited domain. It is shown that the resonant excitation behavior depends strongly on the noise property. Noise induced by a walking phase gives a simple contribution to the dephasing time,
T2, of two-level atoms whereas phase locking qualitatively changes the laser-atom interaction. In the latter case, it is shown that even when the central part of the driving field spectrum is narrower than homogeneous absorption line of the TLA, the wide, low intensity wings of the spectrum (sidebands produced by the locked phase noise), have a strong effect on the FID, TN, and HB induced by the central, narrow part of the spectrum. The influence of sidebands on photon echoes is also discussed.