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arXiv:0712.1774 · Physical Review A

Photon emission by an atom in a lossy cavity

C. Di Fidio, W. Vogel, M. Khanbekyan, D.‐G. Welsch

Published Apr 16, 2008• 47 citations
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Abstract

The dynamics of an initially excited two-level atom in a lossy cavity is studied by using the quantum trajectory method. Unwanted losses are included, such as photon absorption and scattering by the cavity mirrors and spontaneous emission of the atom. Based on the obtained analytical solutions, it is shown that the shape of the extracted spatiotemporal radiation mode sensitively depends on the atom-field interaction. In the case of a short-term atom-field interaction we show how different pulse shapes for the field extracted from the cavity can be controlled by the interaction time.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.77.043822

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•Jan 1, 1965•0 citations
The dynamics of an initially excited two-level atom in a lossy cavity is studied by using the quantum trajectory method. Unwanted losses are included, such as photon absorption and scattering by the cavity mirrors and spontaneous emission of the atom. Based on the obtained analytical solutions, it is shown that the shape of the extracted spatiotemporal radiation mode sensitively depends on the atom-field interaction. In the case of a short-term atom-field interaction we show how different pulse shapes for the field extracted from the cavity can be controlled by the interaction time.
Within the framework of exact quantum electrodynamics in dispersing and absorbing media, we have studied the quantum state of the radiation emitted from an initially in the upper state, prepared two-level atom in a high-Q\mathit{Q}Q cavity, including the regime where the emitted photon belongs to a wave packet that simultaneously covers the areas inside and outside the cavity. For both continuing atom-field interaction and short-term atom-field interaction, we have determined the spatiotemporal shape of the excited outgoing wave packet and calculated the efficiency of the wave packet to carry a one-photon Fock state. Furthermore, we have made contact with quantum noise theories where the intracavity field and the field outside the cavity are regarded as approximately representing independent degrees of freedom such that two separate Hilbert spaces can be introduced.
The interaction of a two-level atom uniformly moving along a classical trajectory with a high-Q cavity quantum mode is analyzed. The dressed-state method is used to derive a recurrence formula for the transition probability of the atom with photon emission; the temporal dynamics of this probability qualitatively depends on the Doppler shift of the atomic transition frequency, on the Rabi frequency of the atom-field system, and on the detuning of the atomic transition frequency from the field mode frequency. The emission dynamics of a moving atom is very sensitive to the detuning. Rabi-type oscillations with a frequency equal to the Doppler shift can arise under certain conditions. At resonance, the emission probability of a moving atom can considerably exceed the emission probability of an atom at rest. A plane-parallel-mirror cavity and a confocal spherical-mirror cavity are considered. It is shown that the peculiarities of Doppler-Rabi oscillations must be taken into account in micromaser theory.
The collapse and revival of quantum states appear in diverse areas of physics. In quantum optics the occurrence of such a phenomena in the evolution of an atomic state, interacting with a light field initially in a coherent state, was predicted by using the Jaynes-Cummings model (JCM), and subsequently demonstrated experimentally. In this paper we revisit the JCM with the Monte-Carlo wave function approach and investigate the time evolution of the photon emission rate of the atom in a cavity. Analytical and numerical quantum trajectory calculations show that the cavity and the initial field statistics strongly influence the photon emission dynamics. A coherent field indeed gives rise to a collapse and revival behavior that mirrors atomic state evolution. However, there are differences between the two. The emission rate for a field in a Fock number state exhibits a sinusoidal oscillation, and there exists a quiescent period for a thermal field. These properties are quite different from those in free space. It is also shown that the fluctuation in photon emission is much less than that of the atomic population.
The interaction between the electromagnetic field and a number of identical atomic systems, individually characterized by an electric dipole moment and two energy levels, is analyzed for the case where the atomic systems are inside a lossy cavity and exposed to a coherent driving field, resonance being assumed between atomic system, cavity, and driving field.The problem of introducing loss into a quantum-mechanical formalism is treated first. Formal operator expressions are obtained for the field variables which include the absorption and the fluctuation (both thermal and quantum-mechanical) effects of the loss mechanism. Expectation values are then obtained for the field strength and the field energy which are valid for times short compared to the lifetime of the excited state. It is shown that the spontaneous-emission energy in the field increases initially as the square of the time and approaches a steady-state value after a transient period which is of the order of the cavity relaxation time. The induced emission contains two parts: incoherent emission induced by the thermal field, and coherent emission induced by the driving field. The incoherent induced-emission energy has the same time dependence as the spontaneous-emission energy, and the ratio of the former to the latter is the number of photons in the thermal (inducing) field. The coherent induced-emission energy does not approach a steady-state value, but, after a transient period, increases linearly with the time. The ratio of the coherent induced-emission energy to the spontaneous-emission energy is equal, initially, to the number of photons in the driving-field energy, but becomes $\ensuremath{\beta}t$ times as large after the transient period, where $\ensuremath{\beta}$ is the reciprocal of the cavity relaxation time.The expectation value of the rate of energy emission by the atomic systems is also obtained. It is shown that the ratio of the downward to the upward transition probabilities has the well-known value of (n+1)n\frac{(n+1)}{n}n(n+1)​, where nnn is the field energy in units of the photon energy, only in the absence of a coherent field.
Abstract The master equation for the atom-field system with degenerate atomic levels and two polarization modes of the quantized field in a damped micro-cavity is obtained in the basis of eigenvectors of the interaction operator. The solution for the lossless cavity is obtained. The analytic expressions for the probability of emission of the photon in the cavity by an excited atom and of the photon polarization matrix are derived in the ‘strong coupling’ and ‘bad cavity’ approximations for arbitrary values of angular momenta of atomic levels. The dependence of the photon polarization on the polarization of the short excitation pulse is studied.
Spontaneous emission competes with stimulated emission in many interactions of light with matter. In the usual analyses which describe the interaction of an atom with a coherent optical field, the spontaneous emission characteristics, e.g., probability and spectral distribution, are not determined. The spontaneous emission from an atom which interacts with a coherent light wave is considered. The competition between coherent photons and spontaneous photons is treated in detail for a system consisting of a stationary atom, an open cavity and spatial fields. In the model chosen, a multilevel atom which spontaneously decays by interacting with spatial fields has two nondegenerate states coupled by an interaction with a single mode of the cavity. The Laplace-transformed Schrodinger equation is solved for specified initial conditions of the system. It is found that the interaction with the coherent field modifies the spectral distribution of spontaneous radiation from the atom. For spontaneous transitions involving an atomic state which interacts with the coherent field, the spectral distributions can no longer be described by Lorentzian functions. The new distributions exhibit a broadening and splitting for strong interactions between the atom and the coherent field. It is shown that the qualitative features of these distributions can be predicted from the energy-level diagram of the atom-cavity system. The net probability of the system gaining a coherent or cavity photon is calculated by integrating over the emitted spontaneous frequencies. The equivalence of this approach to the method of computing probabilities by integrating over time is demonstrated by using Parseval's theorem.