We study the quantum statistics of stimulated photoassociation, using system-reservoir dynamics. We show that, contrary to ``common wisdom,'' spontaneous emission is not the only mechanism by which entropy loss from a material system to a radiation field can occur. By formally treating the matter waves as the bath and the stimulating radiation field as the system, we are able to derive a Lindblad-type equation for the time dependence of the reduced radiation density matrix and show that entropy exchange between matter and radiation in stimulated photoassociation is indeed possible.
We study the quantum statistics of stimulated photoassociation, using system-reservoir dynamics. We show that, contrary to ``common wisdom,'' spontaneous emission is not the only mechanism by which entropy loss from a material system to a radiation field can occur. By formally treating the matter waves as the bath and the stimulating radiation field as the system, we are able to derive a Lindblad-type equation for the time dependence of the reduced radiation density matrix and show that entropy exchange between matter and radiation in stimulated photoassociation is indeed possible.
A model of radiation by multi-atoms is discussed. System A, composed of N atoms with two energy levels, is coupled with a single-mode radiation B. A and B are in turn coupled with two thermal reservoirs D and C respectively, and we also assume that all atoms which are located within a wave length of the radiation field have the same phase. Then under the approximation of long wave, rotating wave and mean fields, by introducing Markov approximation after using the method of density matrix, we have derived the of equations motion for systems A and B respectively. These equations are concerning with the following processes: the spontaneous emission of single atom, the absorption and induced emission stimulated by thermal radiation, the induced emission of N atoms stimulated by single mode coherent state radiation as well as the coherent spontaneous emission of this multi-atoms system. The latter two processes are actually the two kinds of superradiance originated from Dicke model and had been investigated previonsly. We have analysed these five processes by numerical calculations. Besides, the influence of these processes upon the evolution of atomic system attaining thermal equilibrium and the increase of entropy is also discussed. It is pointed out that the correlations inside a multi-atoms system would not be destroyed by coherent spontaneous emission, in contrast with the incoherent one which leads to the change of entropy in atomic system. However, only when the entropy of the two reservoirs has been taken into account, will it be possible to demonstrate the mono-tonic increase in total entropy.
Radiation can change the energy state of matter via three optical processes: spontaneous emission, absorption and stimulated emission. In spontaneous emission, an excited atomic or molecular state decays to a lower energy state with the emission of a photon of energy equal to the difference in the quantum state energies. Photon absorption is the reverse process, with a photon causing excitation from a lower to an excited quantum state. Stimulated emission was first proposed by Einstein in a paper published in 1917. He attempted to balance spontaneous emission and photon absorption, but could not get the correct balance without the postulated process of stimulated emission (see Section 4.2). With stimulated emission, an excited quantum state is stimulated to decay to a lower quantum state by an impinging photon. The existing photon survives with another identical photon being created (so that energy is conserved). The rates at which radiative transitions occur can be calculated using quantum mechanics. The time-dependent Schrodinger equation is used with the system wavefunction comprising time-varying linear combinations of the two wavefunctions for the lower and upper quantum states. In semi-classical treatments, an atom is treated quantum mechanically with the radiation field treated classically. There is a perturbation in energy associated with, say, the electric field of the radiation interacting with the electric dipole of the atom, though other interactions can be significant if the electric dipole interaction energy is small. In absorption, for example, a differential equation representing the change in ‘weighting’ of the wavefunction from the lower to upper state is obtained. A ‘time constant’ for the speed of change represents the rate of the radiative process. We examine the quantum mechanical nature of radiation absorption in Section 10.1 before discussing (Section 10.3) another important parameter arising with radiative transitions between discrete bound quantum states: the lineshape function. Quantum Theory of the Atom–Radiation Interaction An expression for the Einstein B-coefficient for photo-absorption is derived using quantum mechanics in this section. Einstein determined the detailed balance relationship between the rates of spontaneous emission, photo-absorption and stimulated emission when light interacts with an atom by considering an atomic system of two energy levels which are in equilibrium with a black-body radiation field. We use a semi-classical treatment where the atom is treated quantum mechanically and the radiation field is treated as a classical oscillating electric field.
We treat the interaction between an electromagnetic radiation bath and a material system in the semi-classical picture: the radiation is treated according to the Maxwell equations, but the process of emission/absorption is described through the concept of a photon; on the other hand, the material system is modelled according to quantum mechanics, assuming a discrete two-level energy spectrum. This very simple model allows one to elaborate the elementary theory of the absorption/emission coefficients, both for the spontaneous and for the stimulated processes which will be described within the electric dipole approximation. Selection rules for allowed transitions are eventually obtained and the nature of high-order transition is briefly outlined. Finally, a qualitative description of the light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation is presented.
In this paper we attempt to unify the theoretical treatment of a variety of cooperative interaction phenomena occurring in resonantly interacting radiation-matter systems. The system consists of a multimode optical field interacting with N resonant atoms in a region of large spatial extent. The field and atoms may or may not be coupled to reservoirs. We derive a set of coupled master equations for the reduced matter and radiation density operators of the composite system in the first Born approximation, using a method due to Bogoliubov. These equations describe within a single framework phenomena involving superradiant emission and coherent propagation. In the first place, our theory generalizes existing formulations of the superradiance problem by treating the radiation field as part of the dynamical system rather than as a reservoir. Hence, our equations describe stimulated interaction effects, which are entirely absent in the usual superradiance master equations. Moreover, our equations contain terms describing the self-consistent interaction of an average field with a set of polarizable atoms, as in the coupled Bloch and Maxwell equations of the theory of coherent pulse propagation, and enable us to describe fluctuations, arising from incoherent emission, about the average behavior described by the Bloch-Maxwell theory. We solve formally the dynamical equation for the radiation density operator and obtain a displaced multivariate Gaussian distribution centered on the solution of the Maxwell wave equation, which has as parameters the first and second moments of the matter density operator. Then we derive and discuss the field and atomic-moment equations, both in the wave-number and position representations. The moment equations enable us to show the relationship between descriptions of superradiant damping based on the Bloch equations and those based on the existence of correlated atomic states, including both as special cases. We introduce reduced matter moments, which allow us to separate incoherent- and coherent-emission effects and enable us to discuss the question of the closure of the moment equations. Then we consider cases where the behavior of the atomic system is dominated by a strong coherent pump wave or where the atoms are in a symmetric correlated state and show how the slowly-varying-envelope approximation simplifies the radiation-moment equations in these two cases. In the former case, we obtain an approximate theory which consists, in lowest order, of the Bloch-Maxwell equations with radiative-damping terms, plus an equation describing the time development of the correlation function for field fluctuations. Returning to our general formalism, we relate the usual parameters of the theory of radiative decay and of resonant interactions to the more general quantities appearing in our spatial analysis. Finally, we discuss the importance of the stimulated-emission terms appearing in our theory and describe several extensions, including the introduction of inhomogeneous broadening.
Many processes, including absorption and stimulated emission occurring in lasers, can be handled using a semi-classical model for the atom–radiation interaction, in which the matter is given a quantum description, but the radiation is represented as a classical electromagnetic field (see Chapter 2). There are other phenomena that cannot be adequately described without quantizing the radiation. For example, it has been known since the 1930s that spontaneous emission can only be treated correctly using a fully quantum framework for the interaction, in which both the matter and the radiation are quantized, as we shall see in Chapter 6. However, it was not until the 1970s that situations were found in which a free electromagnetic field , far from sources, exhibited properties and behaviour that could not be described by a classical field, but which could be perfectly well interpreted in terms of a quantized field. This chapter is devoted to the quantization of the free electromagnetic field, far from the charges and currents sourcing it. This free electromagnetic field will be called radiation , and in Chapter 6 we shall specify exactly what is meant by radiation when sources are present. The canonical quantization procedure used here starts from a description of the classical dynamics of the field in the framework of the Hamiltonian formalism, the basic features of which are discussed in Section 4.1.
Abstract. In this paper we present a theory which shows that the optical force on atoms due to spontaneous processes depends upon the quantum state of the atom at the time it begins interacting with the optical field. The momentum is treated as a classical variable and the theory used to model the interaction between the atom and radiation is based on a quantum electrodynamic technique. The formalism developed is quite general and, in principle, can be applied to the determination of initial atomic states prepared by a variety of mechanisms. An example of an application of the spontaneous force is presented which shows how it is possible to use the momentum absorbed by an atom from a coherent light field to determine the density matrix of the atomic state created by a collision process. For completeness, the derivation of a stimulated force model is included where it is shown that the resulting force on atoms also depends on their initial state. 1.