  A quantitative theory is developed, which accounts for heating artifacts in
three-pulse photon echo (3PE) experiments. The heat diffusion equation is
solved and the average value of the temperature in the focal volume of the
laser is determined as a function of the 3PE waiting time. This temperature is
used in the framework of nonequilibrium spectral diffusion theory to calculate
the effective homogeneous linewidth of an ensemble of probe molecules embedded
in an amorphous host. The theory fits recently observed plateaus and bumps
without introducing a gap in the distribution function of flip rates of the
two-level systems or any other major modification of the standard tunneling
model.
