Quasiadiabatic following approximation for a dense medium of two-level atoms

Abstract
An adiabaticlike approximation is derived for the optical Bloch equations, extended for dense media, and used to interpret recent numerical results for the resonant interaction of ultrashort pulses with dense media. It is shown that dense media can exhibit behavior analogous to adiabatic following and adiabatic inversion. In particular, we show that dense collections of two-level systems can be adiabatically inverted by intrinsic self-chirping.