Macroscopic effects in electromagnetically-induced transparency in a Doppler-broadened system

We study the electromagnetically-induced transparency (EIT) in a Doppler-broadened cascaded three-level system. We decompose the susceptibility responsible for the EIT resonance into a linear and a nonlinear part, and the EIT resonance reflects mainly the characteristics of the nonlinear susceptibility. It is found that the macroscopic polarization interference effect plays a crucial role in determining the EIT resonance spectrum. To obtain a Doppler-free spectrum there must be polarization interference between atoms of different velocities. A dressed-state model, which analyzes the velocities at which the atoms are in resonance with the dressed states through Doppler frequency shifting, is employed to explain the results.