We examine the effects of degeneracy and its lifting for the problem of electron radiative cascade, described by master equations of the Lindblad form (quantum optical master equations). A weak external field approximation is used to study the resulting gradual transformation of cascade dynamics between degenerate and non-degenerate forms. Exploiting the spherical symmetry properties of the system we demonstrate significant difference between perturbations commuting with angular momentum and perturbations breaking the spherical symmetry, such as a homogeneous external field. We discuss the possibility and the general approach for reduction of the Lindblad master equations in the case of spectral degeneracy to the Pauli balance equations. This determines the appropriate choice of basis as, for example, spherical or parabolic.
The methods of nonequilibrium density-matrix and coarse-temporal conception are used to obtain the kinetic equation for the parameters ${\ensuremath{\gamma}}_{\mathit{n}\mathit{m}}$(t)=Sp[\ensuremath{\rho}^(t)\ensuremath{\Vert}n〉〈m\ensuremath{\Vert}] of a quantum-dynamic system (QDS) interacting with a thermal bath and external stochastic field. It is important that the stochastic field is taken exactly into consideration. For diagonal QDS parameters ${\ensuremath{\gamma}}_{\mathit{n}\mathit{n}}$(t) this equation is reduced to the generalized Pauli equation (GPE) with stochastic time-dependent coefficients
wnm(t). Special attention is given to the procedure of averaging over stochastic processes. It is shown that after averaging over energy fluctuations affected by the stochastic field, in the first cumulant approximation in terms of stochastic processes
wnm(t), the GPE is transformed to the Pauli equation for the QDS state population
Pn(t)=〈${\ensuremath{\gamma}}_{\mathit{n}\mathit{n}}$(t)
〉f. As an example, the relaxation behavior of a two-level system interacting with a dichotomous field (dichotomous Markovian process of kangaroo type) and a harmonic oscillator coupled with a thermal bath is considered. It is shown that the probability of relaxation transitions between energy levels may be changed by several orders of magnitude under the influence of the dichotomous field.