Abstract

Over the past three years we have developed a quantum theory of multiwave mixing designed to determine effects of quantum noise on laser and optical bistability instabilities, pump/probe saturation spectroscopy, AM and FM modulation spectroscopy, and phase conjugation. The theory treats a classical pump field and one or two quantum-mechanical sidemode fields interacting with one- or two-photon, two-level media. The theory¹ produces a master equation for the reduced sidemode density operator able to describe all of the above phenomena in a uniform way closely related to the corresponding semiclassical theories. It has led to a number of significant predictions about the effects of spontaneous emission on laser spectroscopy and optical instabilities.

© 1985 Optical Society of America