Physical Review A
Effects of field-induced quantum coherence on the absorptive line shape of a four-level system with three closely spaced upper levels
Saswata Ghosh, Swapan Mandal
Abstract
The optical Bloch equations of a four-level atomic system with three closely spaced upper levels irradiated by a single mode of the electromagnetic radiation field are constructed. Under the rotating wave approximation and by using the slowly varying envelope approximation, we obtain the analytical solution to these optical Bloch equations. These solutions, which are obtained perturbatively, are used to calculate the polarization and hence the absorptive line shape. In particular, we examine the effects of the field-induced coherence arising from the interference between the probability amplitudes of the levels participating in dipole-allowed transitions. We obtain the shifts of the resonance peak positions due to two different reasons. The first is due to the nonlinear effects arising from the closely spaced nature of the peaks. The second is attributed to the field-induced coherence alone. It is found that the shifts of the positions of the resonance peaks due to field-induced coherence may be in the blue or in the red region.