Paper 3.10: N. Bloembergen, S.D. Kramer, R.T. Lynch, Jr. and H. Lotem, “Double resonance interference in third order light mixing,” Optics Comm. 16, 372–375, 1976.
Reprinted with permission of Elsevier, North-Holland Publishing Co.
This note announces the first examples of dispersion in a multidimensional frequency space. Independently tunable dye lasers are used with two or three light beams incident on the sample. The intensity generated at the frequency ω4 − ω1 + ω2 − ω3 shows resonances when ω1 − ω3 and ω2 − ω3 are resonant with two different raman vibrations, or when ω1 + ω2 is near a two-photon transition and ω1 − ω3 near a vibrational resonance. The latter situation occurs in CuCl crystal, where two collective excitations are simultaneously enhanced, the Z3 excitation at the sum frequency ω1 + ω2 in the near ultraviolet, and the resonance at w1 − w3 of the phonon–polariton in the infrared. Two full-length papers on this subject were published soon afterwards, “Third-order nonlinear optical spectroscopy in CuCl,” S.D. Kramer and N. Bloembergen, Phys. Rev. B14, 4654–4669, 1976, and “Interference between raman resonances in four-wave difference mixing,” Haim Lotem, R.T. Lynch, Jr. and N. Bloembergen, Phys. Rev. B14, 1748–1754, 1976.
Papers 3.9, 3.10, and 3.11 describe early examples of the general features of third-order nonlinear spectroscopy with three incident light beams with independent frequencies, directions of propagation and polarization vectors. At the same time that these developments in condensed matter spectroscopy took place, analogous methods evolved elsewhere in atomic spectroscopy.
S.D. Kramer and R.T. Lynch, Jr. were both graduate students, while Haim Lotem was a postdoctoral research fellow from Israel. After obtaining his Ph.D. degree, Steve Kramer joined the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Bob Lynch joined the IBM development laboratory near San Jose. Steve Kramer now works at the Institute for Defense Analyses near Washington, D.C.
Haim Lotem returned to Israel, where he joined the Nuclear Research Facility near Beersheba. Soon after the Lotem family arrived in the United States, their son Zohar was born. Since sadly no one of their immediate family from Israel could be present, I was asked to serve as godparent at the circumcision ceremony in their Brooklyn apartment. I reminded Haim that I was not Jewish but he replied that it did not matter. Just before the ceremony, the rabbi, or mohel, had a talk with me about how I knew the Lotems, etc., and soon asked about the origin of my family name. When he found out the Protestant Christian background of my family, he disqualified me from entering the room where the circumcision would take place, much to the consternation of the anxious parents. A qualified replacement was immediately found in the person of my graduate student, Eli Yablonovitch. He had been born in Poland and raised in Canada where he obtained a Bachelor of Science degree at McGill University in Montreal. He was a confirmed bachelor at the time and he stated that the last circumcision ceremony he had attended was his own. He carried out this extracurricular duty with good humor. We have kept in close touch with the Lotem family. They returned to the United States several times on sabbatical leaves.
Eli Yablonovitch and I attended a conference in Israel a few years later. On the El Al overnight flight to Israel, I was woken up by a group of men who were involved in an agitated discussion: they needed a tenth person to form a minion. I informed them that they had woken up a disqualified person and pointed out Eli Yablonovitch to them, who again performed the task without fail.
