Rydberg atoms in resonant cavities: coherence, cooperation and fluctuations

S. Haroche

J. M. Raimond, P. Goy, M. Groß +2 more

P. L. Knight

Fritz Haake, Lorenzo M. Narducci, Daniel F. Walls

This book presents the papers given at a conference on quantum optics. Topics considered at the conference included the growth of precipitates in a super saturated system, a space-time picture of relativistic propagation of medium energy hadrons through nuclei, lattice gauge theories, electron-nucleus scattering, short optical pulses, gaussons of the electromagnetic field, collision-induced coherence, spontaneous oscillations in a laser with injected signals, amplitude and phase in quantum optics, and Rydberg atoms in resonant cavities.

M Benassi, Federico Casagrande, W Lange

We consider a mesoscopic maser, in which a beam of excited two-level Rydberg atoms interacts with a single radiation mode during propagation through a resonant cavity. The number of atoms in the cavity ranges from a few tens to a few hundreds. Steady-state and nonlinear dynamics are investigated both with and without a coherent driving field. At steady state, atomic cooperation can induce multistability and temporal instabilities. A novel type of bistability is predicted for the amplitude of the coherently driven cavity field as a function of atomic density. The system dynamics exhibits a variety of regimes, including chaos. We have explored them by varying the experimentally accessible parameters: atomic density, cavity linewidth and driving field amplitude.

Robert Loew, Alexander Krupp, J. Nipper +2 more