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4 - Optical Bloch equations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 May 2011

Malin Premaratne  and
Govind P. Agrawal
Malin Premaratne
Affiliation:
Monash University, Victoria
Govind P. Agrawal
Affiliation:
University of Rochester, New York
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Summary

The analysis in Chapter 3 used a phenomenological form of the permittivity to describe active materials. A proper understanding of optical amplification requires a quantum-mechanical approach for describing the interaction of light with atoms of an active medium [1]. However, even a relatively simple atom such as hydrogen or helium allows so many energy transitions that its full description is intractable even with modern computing machinery [2, 3]. The only solution is to look for idealized models that contain the most essential features of a realistic system. The semiclassical two-level-atom model has proven to be quite successful in this respect [4]. Even though a real atom has infinitely many energy levels, two energy levels whose energy difference nearly matches the photon energy suffice to understand the interaction dynamics when the atom interacts with nearly monochromatic radiation. Moreover, if the optical field contains a sufficiently large number of photons (> 100), it can be treated classically using a set of optical Bloch equations. In this chapter, we learn the underlying physical concepts behind the optical Bloch equations. We apply these equations in subsequent chapters to actual optical amplifiers and show that they can be solved analytically under certain conditions to provide a realistic description of optical amplifiers.

It is essential to have a thorough understanding of the concept of a quantum state [5]. To effectively use the modern machinery of quantum mechanics, physical states need to be represented as vectors in so-called Hilbert space [6].

Type
Chapter
Information
Light Propagation in Gain Media
Optical Amplifiers
 , pp. 88 - 112
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2011

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