Abstract

Usually, the propagation of coherent light in a medium can be described by the Maxwell-Bloch equations. These equations can be viewed as a mean field treatment of a more complete description of the propagation phenomena. Our approach to the problem extends the Maxwell-Bloch equations to include light which cannot be represented by a classical field. This is done in the framework of the BBGKY-hierarchy for many-atom density matrices also applied within the realm of nonlinear atom optics [1].

© 1996 IEEE