Non-Hermitian Floquet dynamics in absorption spectroscopy

A theory of the absorption of a laser field by an atomic or condensed matter medium is presented for the case where the medium is also interacting with a strong electromagnetic field. The rotating wave approximation is not assumed for the latter. It is shown that in the weak probe limit the Lindblad master equation reduces to a smaller system of linear equations for the relevant steady-state coherences. In this limit, the complex susceptibility of the medium can be expressed in terms of individual contributions of decaying dressed states, the latter being eigenstates of a non-Hermitian Floquet Hamiltonian.