Dynamics of an atomic wave packet under Rabi interaction with a single mode of cavity field

Jonathan S. Parker, Carlos R. Stroud

A spontaneously decaying two-level atom in an evacuated high-Q cavity undergoes Rabi oscillations. This phenomenon has been observed experimentally as enhanced or inhibited spontaneous emission. In the standard Jaynes-Cummings model the atom is assumed to interact with only a single cavity mode. By retaining the infinite set of cavity modes the propagation of the spontaneously emitted radiation may be calculated. Such an analysis yields a clear physical picture of Rabi oscillations. These vacuum-field Rabi oscillations are compared with Rabi oscillations of a one-electron atom induced by coherent radiation. We show that the same wave packet analysis explains both types of Rabi oscillation. The limit in which a multimode cavity may be approximated as a single-mode cavity is discussed.

조영탁, Kyungwon An

Young-Tak Chough, Sun-Hyun Youn, Hyunchul Nha +2 more

We investigate the single-atom detection system using an optical standing-wave cavity, from the viewpoint of the quantized center-of-mass motion of the atomic wave packet. We show that since the atom-field coupling strength depends upon the overlap integral of the atomic wave packet and the field mode function, the effect of the wave-packet spreading via the momentum exchange process brings about a significant effect in the detection efficiency. We find that, as a result, the detection efficiency is not sensitive to the individual atomic trajectory for reasonably slow atoms. We also address an interesting phenomenon of the atomic wave-packet splitting occurring when an atom passes through a node of the cavity field.

A. Vidiella-Barranco, José Antonio Roversi, H. M. Moya-Cessa

Alessandro Vaglica

We analyze some aspects of the internal and translational dynamics of a two-level atom interacting with a resonant standing wave of an ideal cavity. We show that the cavity vacuum field can split the incoming wave packet of the excited two-level atom into two parts, whose scalar product in the Hilbert space determines the behavior of the Rabi oscillations. The state of the whole system is derived and allows us to study the correlations between the internal and the translational atomic dynamics. We find that these correlations become negligible when the two parts are sufficiently away from each other in the space.

Pradip Das, Arpita Chatterjee