Rydberg atoms two-photon micromaser

孙为辉, 杜四德, 陈效双

M. Brune, J. M. Raimond, P. Goy +2 more

A Rydberg atom maser operated on a two-photon degenerate atomic transition is discussed. This device combines two interesting features: it is a quantum oscillator working on an intrinsically nonlinear effect and it is a micromaser, with only a few atoms and a few tens of photons at a time in the cavity. The reasons why Rydberg atom-superconducting cavity systems are well adapted for two-photon maser studies are discussed, and the main properties of the device are analyzed by comparing it to Rydberg masers operating on one-photon transitions.>

N. Nayak, A. S. Majumdar, Vasileios Bartzis

We consider a micromaser model to study the influence of Dicke superradiance in the context of the one-atom maser. The model involves a microwave cavity into which two-level Rydberg atoms are pumped in pairs. We consider a random pump mechanism which allows the presence of at most one pair of atoms in the cavity at any time. We analyze the differences between the present system, called the Dicke micromaser, and an equivalently pumped conventional one-atom micromaser. These differences are attributed to the Dicke cooperativity in the two-atom system. We also show that the two-atom Dicke micromaser is equivalent to a one-atom cascade two-photon micromaser. With the introduction of a one-photon detuning, the present theory further describes a true two-photon micromaser. We discuss in detail the role of one-photon detuning in the mechanism of a one-atom two-photon micromaser. This leads us to point out that the two-atom cavity dynamics can be verified by a proper scaling of the results from an equivalent one-atom two-photon micromaser.

Gerard T. Higgins

P. L. Knight

L. Z. Wang

The lifetimes of Rydberg atoms have been considered in micromaser theory. The difference from the usual micromaser theory [P. Filipowicz, J. Javanainen, and P. Meystre, Phys. Rev. A 34, 3077 (1986)] without level decay rates is discussed. It is shown that when the atom-field interaction time is large, the quantum collapse and revival are significantly different from the prediction of the usual micromaser theory. The relation between the photon fluctuation and the fluctuation of the population of the lower level after interacting with a maser field is also discussed. We found that the consistency of the sub-Poisson statistics of the lower-level population and photon number is violated.