Interference of the Electric and Envelope Areas of Ultrashort Light Pulses in Quantum Systems

In recent years, significant progress has been made in generating ultrashort electromagnetic pulses of single-cycle and subcycle duration. Unipolar pulses contain one half-cycle of the field and have a nonzero electric area. The conventional concepts of interaction of electromagnetic radiation with matter (in particular, interference) used in the case of multicycle pulses are not applicable to unipolar ones. This minireview discusses the latest results on the effects of extremely short low-amplitude pulses (when the perturbation theory is valid) on resonant media and individual quantum systems (atoms, molecules, and nanostructures) from the viewpoint of the recently introduced concept of “interference” of the areas of short light pulses (electric and envelope areas). We provide a simple relation showing that in order to compare the effects of multicycle bipolar and subcycle unipolar pulses on micro-objects, one should compare their areas, not energies. By numerically solving the Maxwell–Bloch equations, we study the features of area interference are studied beyond the limits of perturbation theory. It is shown that, after the collision of a pair of π-like ultrashort pulses, polarization structures and population difference gratings with nonharmonic multipeak structures are formed inside the medium. The possibility of experimentally determining the electric area of unipolar pulses through interference of their areas is discussed for the first time.