Abstract

The present summary reports about a dressed- state approach to optical phase conjugation (OPC) by resonant nearly degenerate four-wave mixing (NDFWM) in vapors. The basic idea is to decouple the pump fields from the probe field by first treating the problem of the pump fields interacting with the atom and then consider the interaction with the probe field. From this model, the dip, observed in the OPC yield when the pump fields are tuned to an atomic resonance (see Fig. 1), can be interpreted as an interference effect between contributions to the polarization originating from two dressed-state transitions. In Fig. 1, the OPC yield in rubidium vapor as a function of the pump detuning Δ from the cycling transition 5S²S_1/2(F = 3)−5p²P_3/2(F = 4) is shown. This work was motivated by a paper of Grynberg et al ¹who derived a fully quantum me chanical approach to degenerate four-wave mixing (DFWM) in vapors.

© 1998 Optical Society of America