Abstract

Strong monochromatic field near-resonant to an inhomogeneously broadened material transition is known to produce a narrow hole (peak) in the population spectral density of the initial (final) state. Proper account of material frequency fluctuations (“spectral migration”) on the hole-burning dynamics, especially in the case of a strong field, is a difficult problem, which is of importance in such fields as magnetic resonance, nonlinear spectroscopy, theory of lasers, etc. In the present report, hole burning is considered for the generic case of Doppler-broadened spectra of gases, here the frequency shift of an atom (molecule) is proportional to the velocity component parallel to the field wavevector, whereas spectral migration is due to velocity-changing collisions (VCC). Until now a full solution of the problem was known only for the strong-collision model, where each collision restores the thermal velocity distribution.

© 1999 Optical Society of America