A numerical method is introduced that solves the optical Bloch equations describing a two-level atom interacting with a strong polychromatic pump field with an equidistant spectrum and an arbitrarily intense monochromatic probe field. The method involves a transformation of the optical Bloch equations into a system of equations with time-independent coefficients at steady state via double harmonic expansion of the density-matrix elements, which is then solved by the method of matrix inversion. The solutions so obtained lead immediately to the determination of the polarization of the atomic medium and of the absorption and dispersion spectra. The method is applied to the case when the pump field is bichromatic and trichromatic, and the physical interpretation of the numerically computed spectra is given.

• Received 11 March 1998

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.60.2547