  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.

Quantum Physics;Optics