Four-wave mixing in stochastic fields: Fluctuation-induced resonances

Abstract

The effect of pump fluctuations on various coherent processes that arise in three-level systems interacting with two external fields is examined. Such coherent processes include the forward Hanle effect and various four-wave mixing effects such as the generation of phase-conjugate signals. A general formulation that enables one to calculate the influence of laser linewidth on the coherent signals produced in various directions is presented. Ensemble averages, over laser temporal fluctuations, of various physical quantities, such as atomic polarization, are calculated. The spectrum of polarization fluctuations is shown to consist of several new features which lead to coherent radiation in different directions depending on the resonant frequencies in the polarization fluctuations. The influence of pump linewidth on pressure-induced extra resonance (PIER) is treated in detail. The possibility of producing a laser-fluctuation-induced coherent signal at one of the atomic frequencies is examined. This new signal, which is produced in a direction different from that of the PIER signal, but has the same type of resonant character as PIER, is found to have significantly different pressure dependence than the PIER signal. The results of our numerical computations are qualitatively explained in terms of the convolutions of products of third-order susceptibilities and pump field-correlation functions.