Quantum interference in optical phase-conjugation spectra of vapors

Summary form only given.The present summary reports about a dressed-state approach to optical phase conjugation (OPC) by resonant nearly degenerate four-wave mixing in vapors. The basic idea is to decouple the pump fields from the probe field by first treating the problem of the pump fields interacting with the atom and then consider the interaction with the probe field. From this model, the dip, observed in the OPC yield when the pump fields are tuned to an atomic resonance, can be interpreted as an interference effect between contributions to the polarization originating from two dressed-state transitions.