Theory of a microscopic maser

Filipowicz, P.; Javanainen, Juha; Meystre, Pierre

doi:10.1103/physreva.34.3077

Cited by 537 publications

(374 citation statements)

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“…The many-atom microlaser was shown to be in close agreement with the predictions from a single-atom theory [12], with a perturbation in the width of the photon number distribution due to cavity decay during the interaction time.…”

supporting

confidence: 69%

“…The integrals over g and t int with respective weighting functions f (g) and h(t int ) reflect the distributions in these values. (An analogous stochastic averaging is justified in the appendix of [12].) The rate equation is expressed graphically in Fig.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The seeded results agree with the first branch for densities up to the onset of bistability at N eff ≈ 240; above this point the results agree with the second branch. A calculation for steady-state average photon number using single-atom micromaser theory of Filipowicz et al [12] predicts a sharp transition between the first and second branches in at N 0 eff ≈ 415. No such transition was observed, apparently due to very long metastable lifetimes in the picture of the Fokker-Planck analysis of [12], due to the large photon number.…”

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Observation of multiple thresholds in the many-atom cavity QED microlaser

Fang-Yen

et al. 2006

Phys. Rev. A

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We report the observation of multiple laser thresholds in the many-atom cavity QED microlaser. Traveling-wave coupling and a supersonic atom beam are used to create a well-defined atom-cavity interaction. Multiple thresholds are observed as jumps in photon number due to oscillatory gain. Although the number of intra-cavity atoms is large, up to N ∼ 10 3 , the dynamics of the microlaser agree with a single atom theory. This agreement is supported by quantum trajectory simulations of a many-atom microlaser and a semiclassical microlaser theory. We discuss the relation of the microlaser with the micromaser and conventional lasers.The most fundamental model of light-matter interaction at the atomic level consists of a two-level atom coupled to a single mode of the electromagnetic field, e. g. in an optical resonator. For an atom-cavity coupling strength greater than the decay rates of atom and cavity (g ≫ Γ c , Γ a ), an excited atom exchanges energy coherently with the cavity (Rabi oscillation). [1] Atom-resonator interaction is also the domain of laser physics; therefore it may be somewhat surprising that most descriptions of laser operation use an incoherent model involving population densities and Einstein A and B coefficients. Such a model applies due to gain medium broadening, laser field nonuniformity, and other statistical effects [2].The microlaser is to our knowledge the first laser in which coherent Rabi oscillation is explicitly reflected in the dynamics of the laser. A controlled atom-cavity interaction and absence of strong statistical averaging leads to behavior foreign to conventional lasers. In this paper we report the most dramatic of these effects, the existence of multiple laser thresholds.The microlaser is the optical analogue of the micromaser [3], in which a similar bistable behavior has been observed for a single atom in the cavity [4]. The most significant differences between the two experiments are: (i) a large number of atoms is present, (ii) optical frequencies allow direct detection of generated light, and (iii) the number of thermal photons at optical frequencies is negligible.An earlier version of the microlaser experiment [5] was shown to exhibit laser action with an intracavity atom number N on the order of 1. In the current setup, N ≫ 1; remarkably, the many-atom system exhibits very similar behavior to that predicted from a single atom theory. This is supported by quantum trajectory simulations and may be explained by a semiclassical theory ([6], [7]).The experiment is illustrated in Fig. 1. A supersonic beam of 138 Ba atoms passes through the TEM 00 mode of a high-finesse optical cavity (symmetric near-planar cavity, mirror separation L ≈ 0.94 mm, mirror radius of curvature r 0 = 10 cm, finesse F ≈ 9.0 × 10 5 .) The mirror separation and finesse were determined by measurement of transverse mode spacing and cavity ringdown decay time. The background pressure in the vacuum chamber is less than 10 −6 torr. Prior to entering the cavity mode, each atom is excited by a cw pump laser (Co...

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Observation of multiple thresholds in the many-atom cavity QED microlaser

Fang-Yen

et al. 2006

Phys. Rev. A

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“…where D n and −δ n are defined as the real and imaginary parts of 1 2 µ n , respectively, and p n is the steadystate photon number distribution which can be obtained by the standard theory of the micromaser [22]. The optical spectrum obtained by…”

Section: B Master Equation For ρ (1)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantum theory of frequency pulling in the cavity-QED microlaser

Hong

2012

Phys. Rev. A

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The spectrum of the cavity-QED microlaser/micromaser is expected to show distinctive features of the coherent light-matter interaction, which are obscured in the conventional Schawlow-Townes linewidth theory. However, the spectral studies has been limited to resonant atom-cavity interaction so far. Here we consider the dispersive interaction in the off-resonance case, from which we uncover a quantum frequency pulling effect in the microlaser/micromaser spectrum. We present a quantum theory of the spectrum which introduces the notion of a frequency-pulling distribution associated with the photon number. In contrast to the conventional laser, periodic variation of the mean frequency pulling is observed with increasing pump parameter and it is attributed to the strong atom-cavity coupling. The pulling distribution gives rise to a spectral broadening, which can be dominant over the non-dispersive broadening addressed in the previous works. We also developed a corresponding semiclassical theory and discuss how the introduction of the frequency shift fits in with the extended quantum theory.

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“…We do not want to present a detailed calculation for this model here, as this system does not provide too much new. We will rather give a comparison with a standard microlaser model for atoms [14][15][16][17][18].…”

Section: Ppd Microlasermentioning

confidence: 99%