Microscopic derivation of kinetic equations for interacting optical two-level systems

Kinetic equations are derived for optical two-level atoms interacting with a molecular subsystem treated as a thermostat. It is assumed that the kinetics is determined by the electric dipole interaction perturbed by the thermal motion. Dynamic parts of the kinetic equations coincide with the corresponding terms of optical Bloch equations, whereas nonlinear relaxation and shift terms have the specific form and are absent in the phenomenological generalized Bloch equations. It is shown that the relaxation kinetics can be substantially different from the exponential one and depends on the initial state of the system. In particular, the inversion relaxation is frozen at small deviations from the equilibrium. The possibility of observation of the optical bistability is discussed.