Nonimpact theory of absorption line broadening in strong radiation fields

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Abstract
We develop an expansion for the absorption line shape of a two-level system in a strong radiation field being perturbed by dephasing collisions with a thermal bath of foreign atoms. We assume that the bath atoms do not interact with the radiation field and with each other. The microscopic information relevant for line broadening in a strong field is expressed in terms of a hierarchy of dipole correlation functions. The latter may be calculated with the use of the Franck-Condon factors for the nuclear wave functions. The present theory reduces in the weak-field limit to the well-known linear unified theory of line broadening and in the impact limit we recover the Karplus-Schwinger formula.