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Journal of the Physical Society of Japan

Stochastic Theory of Coherent Optical Transients

Eiichi Hanamura

Published Jun 1, 1983• 79 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Photon echo and free induction decay, i.e., representative coherent optical transients, are described for two level system whose transition frequency is modulated by the Gaussian-Markoffian process. Photon echo signal is shown to decay biexponentially and to be effective in fixing the magnitude and the correlation time of the frequency modulation. Then we present the transition of the free induction decay rate against laser intensity from the Bloch type at the weak laser field into the Redfield one at the strong laser field.

DOI
10.1143/jpsj.52.2258

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Photon echo and free induction decay, i.e., representative coherent optical transients, are described for two level system whose transition frequency is modulated by the Gaussian-Markoffian process. Photon echo signal is shown to decay biexponentially and to be effective in fixing the magnitude and the correlation time of the frequency modulation. Then we present the transition of the free induction decay rate against laser intensity from the Bloch type at the weak laser field into the Redfield one at the strong laser field.
A consistent explanation of recent studies by Szabo and Muramoto [Phys. Rev. A 39, 3992 (1989); 38, 5928 (1988)] on the experimental test of modified optical Bloch equations is presented. It is shown that the observed peculiarities of optical transients in solids are connected with the mechanism of relaxation in systems with slow stochastic modulation. A theory of laser-modified relaxation and analysis of free induction decay (FID), hole burning, and rotary echo (RE) in such systems are presented. The universal character of the FID time dependence and field-independent RE decay is predicted.
The effect of frequency modulation on optical phenomena is reduced critically when the Rabi frequency increases beyond the inverse correlation time or the amplitude of the frequency modulation. This is observed in the time region as the change of the free induction decay rate from the Bloch type into the Redfield one. That is shown in this paper to be observable also in the frequency region as the narrowing of the central line and the side bands split-off by the Rabi frequency above and below it in the emission spectrum beyond the Rabi frequency equal to the inverse correlation time.
We report theoretical and experimental studies of the propagation of a square-modulated laser pulse through a laser-cooled atomic ensemble of two-level absorbers, as well as through a three-level system with electromagnetically induced transparency. We find that the transmission characteristics over a wide range of optical depth can be fully accounted for as optical coherent transients excited by the wide spectral content of the square-modulated optical pulse. We show that both time-domain atom-field coupled equations and frequency-domain linear dispersion theory give precisely the same description of the optical transients at a weak power limit. At low optical depth with moderate absorption, resonant excitation dominates and free-induction decay (FID) contributes mostly to the transient field. At high optical depth when absorption and propagation effects become significant, lossless optical precursors start to dominate the transient response. By varying the optical depth from 0 to 45, we observe that optical transients evolve gradually from FID to optical precursors. We thus show that FID and optical precursors, which have been considered as two different optical transients for many decades, can be unified within a single theoretical frame and they are the manifestations of the same physical process in two different regimes.
The semiconductor Bloch equations are solved numerically for a two-pulse photon-echo configuration. The time-dependent diffracted signal is computed and the significance of many-body effects, carrier relaxation, and dephasing is investigated in detail. Assuming femtosecond-pulse excitation at various intensities and frequencies, distinctly different results are obtained if the exciton or the continuum electron-hole-pair states are excited. It is shown that pure exciton excitation produces a free-induction decay signal and no photon echo. An echo signal is obtained only if continuum states are excited either directly by choosing the central pulse frequencies appropriately or if the band-gap renormalization is sufficiently strong to shift continuum states into resonance. A continuous transition between free-induction decay and photon-echo signal is obtained with increasing excitation amplitude. A perturbative analytical analysis of the equations allows one to identify the role of the many-body effects in producing the different features.