Abstract

We have found new analytic results for a wide variety of atomic excitation processes which involve the use of amplitude-and frequency-modulated laser pulses: (1) We have unified all the previously known solutions including those of Rosen and Zener,¹ Landau² and Zener,³ Rabi,⁴ Bambini and Berman,⁵ Demkov,⁶ McCall and Hahn,⁷ Allen and Eberly,⁸ and Hioe,⁹ among others, and have significantly extended it with expressions involving three free parameters and an arbitrary function to an infinite variety of amplitude-and frequency-modulated laser pulses.¹⁰ We have found a simple condition which the three essential parameters in the amplitude-and frequency-modulation functions must satisfy in order to achieve a complete population inversion, or to achieve a complete population restoration as in the case of self-induced transparency⁷ or soliton propagation.

© 1985 Optical Society of America