Abstract

Nearly degenerate theories of multiwave mixing in both two-level and semiconductor media have been given in many references.^[1-4] However to our knowledge, none has yet given a theory of multiwave mixing in quasiequilibrium semiconductor or short-T₂ two-level media that expresses the mixing coefficients directly in terms of an arbitrary nonlinear single-mode susceptibility, χ. Use of the nonlinear single-mode susceptibility lends the subject both a generality and a way to compare the mixing phenomena in different kinds of nonlinear media. We present such a general theory in this paper. The two main assumptions are 1) that a susceptibility is definable, and 2) that the dipole can be adiabatically eliminated. Some aspects of many-body effects^[5] might be treatable approximately by numerically calculating the polarization of the medium self consistently and then dividing by the pump-wave amplitude to get a nonlinear single-mode χ.

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