Quantum nonlinear oscillator in a harmonic field

M. Kuzmin, Vladimir Sazonov

Rachel Glenn, Kochise Bennett, Konstantin E. Dorfman +1 more

Abstract The response of classical or quantum harmonic oscillators coupled linearly to a classical field is strictly linear; all nonlinear response functions vanish identically. We show that, if the oscillators interact with quantum modes of the radiation field, they acquire nonlinear susceptibilities. The effective third order susceptibility induced by four interactions with quantum modes contains collective resonances involving pairs of oscillators. All nonlinearities are missed by the conventional approximate treatment based on the quantum master equations.

Andrey G. Grozin

V I Gorchakov, Vladimir Sazonov

It is shown that, in a laser radiation field of I≈108 W/cm2 intensity, an oscillator having a dipole moment d01≈0.1 D is excited in a time t≤100 nsec to levels with n = 4–5 and the probability of such excitation is 10%. Such excitation is only possible for a nonlinear oscillator; it is essentially a quantum effect and can be interpreted as tunneling in the energy space.

Ray LaPierre

Erich W. Schmid, Gerhard Spitz, Wolfgang Lösch