Journal of Modern Optics
Atomic motion in a standing-wave squeezed light field
A. S. Parkins, Rainer Müller
Abstract
We investigate atomic motion in the standing-wave field of a cavity driven by coherent light plus broad-band-squeezed vacuum. We assume the bad-cavity limit and adiabatically eliminate the cavity mode, deriving a master equation for the atomic variables alone. From this master equation we study the (one-dimensional) atomic motion both in the semiclassical approximation and using quantum Monte Carlo wavefunction simulations. The light force and momentum diffusion are shown to be strongly dependent on the relative phase between the coherent and squeezed fields and, using a dressedstate analysis, we identify observable effects unique to the reduced quantum noise that characterizes squeezed-vacuum light.