Calculation of single-beam two-photon absorption rate of lanthanides: effective operator method and perturbative expansion

Perturbative contributions to single-beam two-photon transition rates may be divided into two types. The first, involving low-energy intermediate states, require a high-order perturbation treatment, or an exact diagonalization. The other, involving high energy intermediate states, only require a low-order perturbation treatment. We show how to partition the effective transition operator into two terms, corresponding to these two types, in such a way that a many-body perturbation expansion may be generated that obeys the linked cluster theorem and has a simple diagrammatic representation.