Population inversion atoms in the ground and excited states are equal, the rate of stimulated emission is equal to the rate of absorption for a given radiation density. The critical detail of stimulated emission is that the induced photon has the same frequency and phase as the incident photon. In other words, the two photons are coherent. It is this property that allows optical amplification, and the production of a laser system. During the operation of a laser, all three light-matter interactions described above are taking place. Initially, atoms are energized from the ground state to the excited state by a process
Sound amplification by stimulated emission of radiation eigenstates of the Hamiltonian as well. These states are equally spaced both in energy and real space and form the so-called Wannier-Stark ladder. In the proposed scheme, an application of an electrical bias to a semiconductor superlattice is increasing the amplitude of coherent folded phonons generated by an optical pulse. This increase of the amplitude is observed for those biases in which the energy drop per period of the superlattice is greater than the phonon energy. If the superlattice is biased such that the energy drop per period of the superlattice exceeds the width of electronic minibands (Wannier-Stark regime), the