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Physical Review A

Micromaser with injected atomic phase

Rebecca R. McGowan, William C. Schieve

Published Sep 1, 1997• 11 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Both approximate and exact methods exist to determine the density matrix of the field inside an incoherently driven micromaser, but as of yet only a steady-state Fokker-Planck solution has been found for the micromaser with injected atomic phase [Phys. Rev. A 34, 2032 (1986)]. Since Fokker-Planck solutions have been shown not to represent the effect of trapping states on the cavity field adequately, other solutions must be sought. In this paper, we present both a highly accurate approximate analytical solution and a more computationally complex numerical solution based on the exact methods of Lu [Phys. Rev. A 47, 1347 (1993)], both of which demonstrate symmetry breaking in the phase. Since the spectra of the injected phase micromaser will be the same as that of the incoherently pumped case, we present numerical comparisons of our two solutions via the phase variance.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.56.2373

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Both approximate and exact methods exist to determine the density matrix of the field inside an incoherently driven micromaser, but as of yet only a steady-state Fokker-Planck solution has been found for the micromaser with injected atomic phase [Phys. Rev. A 34, 2032 (1986)]. Since Fokker-Planck solutions have been shown not to represent the effect of trapping states on the cavity field adequately, other solutions must be sought. In this paper, we present both a highly accurate approximate analytical solution and a more computationally complex numerical solution based on the exact methods of Lu [Phys. Rev. A 47, 1347 (1993)], both of which demonstrate symmetry breaking in the phase. Since the spectra of the injected phase micromaser will be the same as that of the incoherently pumped case, we present numerical comparisons of our two solutions via the phase variance.
A detailed theoretical and experimental study of the atom-field interaction starting from first principles was made possible by the realization of the single-atom micromaser. The situation is very close to the ideal case of a single two-level atom interacting with a single quantized mode of a superconducting cavity. In spite of the considerable amount of work devoted to the study of the micromaser, it still remains to be established how the system behaves under coherent pumping. We present a comprehensive study of the coherently pumped micromaser; we develop an analytic method to obtain the steady-state solution of the master equation governing the time evolution of the cavity field. We illustrate this method with a simple example and present results for the photon distribution and purity of the steady state of the coherently pumped micromaser.
We study the dynamics of a micromaser where the pumping atoms are strongly driven by a resonant classical field during their transit through the cavity mode. We derive a master equation for this strongly driven micromaser, involving the contributions of the unitary atom-field interactions and the dissipative effects of a thermal bath. We find analytical solutions for the temporal evolution and the steady state of this system by means of phase-space techniques, providing an unusual solvable model of an open quantum system, including pumping and decoherence. We derive closed expressions for all relevant expectation values, describing the statistics of the cavity field and the detected atomic levels. The transient regime shows the buildup of mixtures of mesoscopic fields evolving towards a super-Poissonian steady-state field that, nevertheless, yields atomic correlations that exhibit stronger nonclassical features than the conventional micromaser.
We investigate the dynamics of a micromaser continuously driven by a resonant coherent field and pumped by atoms injected in superposition states. We formulate a master equation for the system, and by a Monte Carlo wave-function approach we describe the steady-state behavior as a function of atomic-transit time or driving-field intensity. The combined action of polarized atoms and driving field can lead to enhancement or suppression of coherence in system dynamics, including nonclassical effects such as quadrature squeezing, sub-Poissonian photon statistics, and revival of Rabi oscillations, as well as to shifts of the induced cavity-field phase. These results show the possibility of manipulating both the photon number and the phase of the cavity field.
We calculate the spectrum of the micromaser with quantized motion of the pump atoms [M. O. Scully, G. M. Meyer, and H. Walther, Phys. Rev. Lett. 76, 4144 (1996)] in different velocity regimes. We show that when the kinetic energy of the pump atoms is comparable to the atom-field interaction energy the spectrum of the cavity field is no longer centered at the cavity frequency. In the case of very slow atoms huge broadenings and shifts occur in the vicinity of the mazer resonances. We present approximate analytical results for the spectrum that allow a comparison with the exact numerical calculations.