Eur. Phys. J. B 84, 161-165 (2011)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2011-20685-8

Regular Article

Population difference study of few-cycle laser pulse propagating in near-resonant two-level atom medium

Department of Physics, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, P.R. China

^a e-mail: dzyao@whu.edu.cn

Received: 21 August 2011
Received in final form: 1 October 2011
Published online: 10 November 2011

Abstract

We have theoretically studied the propagation of few-cycle laser pulse in near-resonant two-level atom medium by solving Maxwell-Bloch equations with a predictor-corrector finite-difference time-domain method. Hyperbolic secant pulses with area 2π, 4π and 6π are adopted as the initial inputs. For large pulse area, the carrier-wave Rabi flopping occurs in the faster split 2π pulse and causes spectra broadening which subsequently increases the induced population difference. Combined with the contribution of periodically varying carrier-envelop phase, the maximum of population difference gives rise to an interesting phenomenon.