Four-wave mixing under double-resonance conditions

Abstract
The authors study four-wave mixing when both the two-photon transition between the ground state and an excited state mod 0> and the one-photon transition between that excited state and an autoionising state mod 1> are nearly resonant. When mod 0> and mod 1> are strongly coupled, one of the eigenstates resulting from their mixing is almost stable against ionisation under certain conditions of frequency and intensity. The authors show that in this case an efficient frequency conversion should be obtained, since losses due to ionisation are expected to be strongly reduced.