Susceptibility of strongly driven two-level atoms: A non-Markovian analysis

Abstract

The absorptive part of the susceptibility of a system constituted by a strongly driven two-level atom (interacting with a reservoir) is analyzed when probed by a weak field. Memory effects are taken into account (the correlation time of the reservoir variables is finite) and we verify that they lead to several distinct features for the absorption and stimulated emission of radiation, when compared with those obtained in the Markovian approximation. Moreover, we verify that memory effects lead to a signature, namely, the sensitive dependence of the maxima of the absorption lines on the Rabi frequency at off-resonance pumping. Other characteristics of the spectrum are enhanced, even in the presence of a small but non-null correlation time of the reservoir, for instance, the maxima of the dispersionlike absorption curves at on-resonance pumping. In this work several situations are analyzed for different values of the parameters of the problem: the off-resonance frequencies of the driving field, the Rabi frequency, the memory time, and temperature of the reservoir.