<title>Optical coherent transients induced by time-delayed fluctuating pulses</title>

Abstract

A theory is developed to describe the optical transient signals that arise when a sample of two-level atoms is irradiated by a sequence of two or three broad-bandwidth pulses is presented. The first two pulses have a relative delay time of order of the correlation time of the pulse fluctuations. These pulses whose temporal width is much greater than the delay time are fully correlated with one another and can be strong enough to saturate the two-level atomic transition. In the case of three-pulse transients the third pulse is weak non-correlated with the first two and is delayed in time so that it does not overlap them. Taking into account the effects ofinhomogeneous and homogeneous broadening we calculate the intensity of the transient signals as a function of delay time. The signals are found to depend dramatically on the intensities of the excitation pulses. It is shown that for strong excitation pulses a direct dependence of the signal on the cross-correlation time of the pulses r occurs that does not exist when the pulses are weak. In particular for saturating pulses the signals exhibit a peak of width of order r . In the case of the two-pulse transient the peak is found to disappear when the Doppler width of the atomic ensemble becomes sufficiently large. This peak can have a very narrow dip near its maximum whose width is much