In 2011, Kumar et al. (2011 Phys. Rev. A 84 043402) studied the light force acting on a beam of neutral two-level atoms superimposed on a few-cycle-pulse Gaussian laser field under both resonant and off-resonant conditions by solving the optical Bloch equation beyond the rotating-wave approximation, and they found that under resonant condition the transverse component of the light force shows oscillatory behavior but vanishes when a time average is taken, and the time averaged longitudinal force is nonzero only when the Rabi frequency is smaller than the resonant frequency and vanishes when the Rabi frequency is equal to or larger than the resonant frequency.

In this paper, we investigate further the strong nonlinear optical interaction between a two-level atomic system and a femtosecond Gaussian laser pulse by solving numerically the full-wave optical Bloch equations through using the predictor-corrector method. It is found that the light forces and the light potentials are sensitive to the value of the Rabi frequency and the detuning of the laser field. Under the resonant condition, the instant light forces induced by the femtosecond laser pulse change their signs as a function of time. The instant longitudinal light force changes its sign at twice the Rabi frequency, while the instant transverse light force changes its sign at twice the light carrier-wave frequency. However, none of the time-averaged light forces is zero, showing periodical oscillation characters as a function of Rabi frequency. Both of the time-averaged longitudinal and transverse light forces oscillate at the Rabi frequency corresponding to the pulse area of 2\textπ. The time-averaged transverse light force shows also a trend of enhancement with Rabi frequency increasing, and the time-averaged longitudinal light force shows also a saturation trend with the increase of the Rabi frequency. The optical potential depends strongly on the detuning. It changes gradually from repulsive potential to attractive potential when the detuning defined here changes from negative to positive detuning. When the field is nearly resonant, the optical potential then oscillates between repulsive and attractive potentials. Therefore, neutral atoms can be focused, defocused, trapped, splitted or steered by the femtosecond laser field with appropriate detuning and Rabi frequency.