Photon echo under excitation of a medium by pulses consisting of an arbitrary number of oscillations

Abstract

Echo responses of a three-level medium formed by the λ-scheme of quantum transitions under exposure to optical pulses consisting of an arbitrary number of oscillations have been studied theoretically. The cases of pulses consisting of few optical oscillations (for which the concept of an envelope cannot be used) and combinations of such pulses and quasi-monochromatic resonance signals have been considered. The approach used can be reduced to the renormalization of dipole moments of allowed quantum transitions through their multiplication by coefficients depending on the shape and duration of pump pulses and having absolute values in the range from zero (for nonresonance pulses) to unity (for resonance quasi-monochromatic pulses and broadband pulses consisting of few oscillations, whose spectrum covers the quantum transitions). A general equation has been proposed for the pulse area. In the limit of a large number of oscillations, it transforms into the well-known definition of the area of a quasi-monochromatic signal. The characteristics of primary and longlived photon echoes have been analyzed in detail. It has been shown that, when a medium is exposed to only pulses consisting of a few oscillations, three echo responses of both types can be principally generated at each frequency of the λ-scheme. Introduction of quasi-monochromatic pulses in pump pulse series decreases the number of echoes, and their qualitative character has a non-commutative property with respect to pulse permutation in a series. The extension of the proposed approach to more complex schemes of quantum transitions with the large number of quantum levels faces no principal difficulties.