Recently, the advances in generation and characterization techniques of ultrashort laser pulses made it practical to prepare precisely defined laser pulses, these open up new possibilities for studying and controlling dynamical processes in femtosecond time scale. Hitherto, frequency-synthesized or chirped laser pulses have been widely applied to high-order harmonic generation (HHG) [3], population transfer [4], multiphoton transitions between Rydberg states [5], ect. Both the interference of two-color pulses and the nontrivial time dependence of chirped pulse laser field may lead to very interesting results. Moreover, recent studies have manifested that chirping can also have much impacts on the laser pulses as it propagates through different medium. For example, the propagation properties of chirped soliton pulses in optical nonlinear Kenmedia were investigated by Desaix et al. [6]. The result indicates that the properties of asymptotically emerging solitons depend not only on the magnitude, but also on the form of the initial chirp. In particular, the splitting of an initial pulse into separating soliton pulse pairs only occurs for certain classes of initial chirp functions. The influence of pulse shape and frequency chirp on stability of optical solitons was studied by Klaus and Shaw [7]. They found that destabilization occurs when eigenvalues of an associated Zakharov-Shabat system, which move along the positive imaginary axis with increasing chirp parameter, either are absorbed into the lower half plane or collide with a nother eigenvalue. Furthermore, the signal and group velocities for chirped pulses propagating through a GaAs cavity were measured by Centini et al. [8]. They showed that the chirp substantially modifies the group velocity of the pulse, but leaves the signal velocity unaltered.
We analyze the phase modulation, or chirping, of coherent lossless light pulses propagating without distortion through resonant absorbers. In order to do this, we generalize the pioneering work of McCall and Hahn in two different directions. In the first place, of course, we abandon their assumption that the phase of the pulses has no temporal dependence. We prove that for slowly varying single pulses, chirping is not possible. However, we describe many multiple-pulse trains which are necessarily chirped, even under the slowly varying envelope restriction, and also describe the envelope modulations which produce large chirps. We show that certain zero-$\ensuremath{\pi}$ chirped pulse trains are contained as special cases of our general results. Our second generalization of the McCall-Hahn work concerns the background material in which the two-level resonant atoms are suspended. We allow the host medium to possess significant nonresonant nonlinearities. We find that undistorted lossless single pulses are possible in such a medium and that they are necessarily chirped.
Resonant absorbing media having many atoms within a cubic resonance wavelength can exhibit large frequency chirps in pulse propagation due to dipole-dipole interactions among the atoms. Analytic solutions are obtained for invariant pulse propagation in such a medium consisting of interacting two-level atoms. Departures from the McCall-Hahn results include nonhyperbolic secant pulse shapes and different than 2π-area pulses. In addition, the excitation of the medium is comparatively suppressed for the same group velocity. The results are interpreted to suggest new experiments.
A more accurate description of the 2 pi pulse of self-induced transparency is obtained. This is an exact solution of an approximate form of the Maxwell-Bloch equations in which only backscattering is neglected; the equations are valid at densities less than about 10 18 atoms cm -3 . At such densities the 2 pi sech pulse of McCall and Hahn (1967, 1969) remains a good approximate well into the picosecond range. The more accurate solution is chirped by a factor proportional to the square of the ratio of the spectral width of the pulse to its carrier wave frequency. The stability of this pulse solution and other N soliton solutions of the approximate Maxwell-Bloch equations is demonstrated.
We have found new analytic results for a wide variety of atomic excitation processes which involve the use of amplitude-and frequency-modulated laser pulses: (1) We have unified all the previously known solutions including those of Rosen and Zener,1 Landau2 and Zener,3 Rabi,4 Bambini and Berman,5 Demkov,6 McCall and Hahn,7 Allen and Eberly,8 and Hioe,9 among others, and have significantly extended it with expressions involving three free parameters and an arbitrary function to an infinite variety of amplitude-and frequency-modulated laser pulses.10 We have found a simple condition which the three essential parameters in the amplitude-and frequency-modulation functions must satisfy in order to achieve a complete population inversion, or to achieve a complete population restoration as in the case of self-induced transparency7 or soliton propagation.
A simple model for optical pulse propagation in a nondegenerate two-level amplifying medium is considered, under the assumption of extreme Doppler broadening. Starting with a "Pade approximant" left reflection coefficient with N simple poles and N$\sb{\rm b}\leq$ N bound states, and employing Lamb's one-component inverse scattering method*, pulses whose initial area can be
>π are obtained. Then, employing the asymptotic behavior of the eigenvalues of the kernel of the right Marchenko equation, the asymptotic behavior of the pulses far into the medium is analyzed in detail when N
≤ 3. In addition to the expected portion of area
π near the light cone which undergoes amplification and compression, pulses with a continuous leading edge develop forward-moving oscillations, and some pulses trail behind one or more 2
π (or 0
π) solitons. Pulses whose final area is
π, 3
π, and 5
π are obtained. Interestingly, the number of trailed solitons is in general not equal to the number of bound states. These solitons are associated with a subset of the zeroes of the transmission coefficient rather than of its poles. Conditions for the appearance of a soliton are given in terms of the poles and residues of the left reflection coefficient. A connection is established between the values of the pulse profiles and their first 2N
− 1 derivatives at the light cone, and the residue and pole parameters of the left reflection coefficient. For N = 2 and the case in N = 3 where the pulse has a continuous leading edge, simple conditions for the appearance of a soliton are obtained in terms of the values of the pulse profiles and their first N
− 1 derivatives at the light cone, and the poles of the left reflection coefficient. It is established for N
≤ 3 that for each 2
π soliton there is a purely imaginary zero of the left reflection coefficient