Coherent interaction of laser pulses in a resonant optically dense extended medium under the regime of strong field-matter coupling

Nonstationary pump-probe interaction between short laser pulses propagating in a resonant optically dense coherent medium is considered. A special attention is paid to the case, where the density of two-level particles is high enough that a considerable part of the energy of relatively weak external laser-fields can be coherently absorbed and reemitted by the medium. Thus, the field of medium reaction plays a key role in the interaction processes, which leads to the collective behavior of an atomic ensemble in the strongly coupled light-matter system. Such behavior results in the fast excitation interchanges between the field and a medium in the form of the optical ringing, which is analogous to polariton beating in the solid-state optics. This collective oscillating response, which can be treated as successive beats between light wave-packets of different group velocities, is shown to significantly affect propagation and amplification of the probe field under its nonlinear interaction with a nearly copropagating pump pulse. Depending on the probe-pump time delay, the probe transmission spectra show the appearance of either specific doublet or coherent dip. The widths of these features are determined by the density-dependent field-matter coupling coefficient and increase during the propagation. Besides that, the widths of the coherent features, which appear close to the resonance in the broadband probe-spectrum, exceed the absorption-line width, since, under the strong-coupling regime, the frequency of the optical ringing exceeds the rate of incoherent relaxation. Contrary to the stationary strong-field effects, the density- and coordinate-dependent transmission spectra of the probe manifest the importance of the collective oscillations and cannot be obtained in the framework of the single-atom model.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures, to be published in Phys. Rev.

Disruption of the three-body gravitational systems: Lifetime statistics

We investigate statistics of the decay process in the equal-mass three-body problem with randomized initial conditions. Contrary to earlier expectations of similarity with "radioactive decay", the lifetime distributions obtained in our numerical experiments turn out to be heavy-tailed, i.e. the tails are not exponential, but algebraic. The computed power-law index for the differential distribution is within the narrow range, approximately from -1.7 to -1.4, depending on the virial coefficient. Possible applications of our results to studies of the dynamics of triple stars known to be at the edge of disruption are considered.Comment: 13 pages, 2 tables, 3 figure

Bargmann-Michel-Telegdi equation and one-particle relativistic approach

A reexamination of the semiclassical approach of the relativistic electron indicates a possible variation of its helicity for electric and magnetic static fields applied along its global motion due to zitterbewegung effects, proportional to the anomalous part of the magnetic moment.Comment: 10 pages, LATEX2E, uses amsb

Multiple stars: Physics vs. dynamics

We review physical and dynamical parameters of multiple stars. Possible scenaria of multiple star formation are discussed: their birth in dense cloud cores and the decay of small stellar groups and clusters. We compare physical and dynamical features of simulated multiple stars formed by these processes with the actual multiple stars. Multiplicity function, their period, eccentricity and mass ratio distributions, hierarchy of the structures are analysed. Also we discuss multiple systems where the apparent ages of the components are different. Such diferences can be explained by poor evolutionary tracks for low-mass stars, by formation of such systems by capture or by merging of components during dynamical evolution of multiple stars. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

Dynamical stability of the quadruple systems HD 68255/6/7 and HD 76644

We analyze the dynamical stability of the hierarchical quadruple systems HD 68255/6/7 and HD 76644 via numerical integration of the equations of motion of the four-body problem, with a chainlike regularization of close stellar interactions. The observational errors were taken into account using Monte Carlo simulations, assuming that they possessed a Gaussian distribution. HD 68255/6/7 is probably stable, while HD 76644 is unstable with a probability exceeding 0.97 and with a disruption time of no more than 105 years. The influence of the observational errors and possible scenarios for the formation of unstable multiple stars are discussed. © Pleiades Publishing, Inc., 2006