Sub- and superluminal propagation of intense pulses in media with saturated and reverse absorption

We develop models for the propagation of intense pulses in solid state media which can have either saturated absorption or reverse absorption. We model subluminal propagation in ruby and superluminal propagation in alexandrite as three and four level systems, respectively, coupled to Maxwell's equations. We present results well beyond the traditional pump-probe approach and explain the experiments of Bigelow et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 90, 113903 (2003); Science 301, 200 (2003)] on solid state materials.