Ac Stark effect in a doubly driven three-level atom

In this paper we present a detailed treatment of the ac Stark effect of a three-level atom driven by two strong laser fields in a cascade scheme. We consider two situations where there is a weak laser field probing a new transition starting from one of the three levels to a fourth level. In one case the initial level of the probed transition is the ground state and in the other case the initial level is the intermediate state. For both situations we derive an analytical expression for the absorptive and dispersive responses of the weak probe field and present the spectrum obtained from numerical calculation. The general feature of the spectrum has a three-peak structure. The positions and relative intensities of the three spectral components are affected strongly by the driving field intensities and detunings. An account of the spectrum is given in terms of the dressed-state formalism.