München 2004 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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Q: Quantenoptik und Photonik

Q 36: Poster Quanteneffekte

Q 36.13: Poster

Donnerstag, 25. März 2004, 14:00–16:00, Schellingstr. 3

One- and N-atom lasers — •M. Hennrich, A. Kuhn, and G. Rempe — Max-Planck-Institut für Quantenoptik, Hans-Kopfermann-Str. 1, 85748 Garching, Germany

The one-atom laser is the quantum-mechanical limit of a classical laser. It is very appealing to examine the transition between these two regimes. Here we describe a simple death-birth rate-equation model [1] of an atom-cavity system with fixed atom number N. The simplicity of this model allows us to examine the transition from the microscopic one-atom to the mesoscopic many-atom system.

Once placed in an optical cavity, the atoms can interact via the common mode. The interaction is negligible as long as the photons emitted into the cavity decay faster than they are reabsorbed by another atom. In this case the atoms can be treated as independent emitters. As for resonance fluorescence in free space [2], both photon antibunching for a single atom and bunching for many atoms are observed. If the cavity decays more slowly, the atom-atom interaction via the cavity mode increases. Provided that the pumping to the excited state is strong enough to invert the system, a laser threshold is reached. The results of the theoretical model are compared with experimental data [3,4].

[1] Rice et al. Phys. Rev. A 50, 4318 (1994)

[2] Carmichael et al. J. Phys. A 11, L121 (1978)

[3] Hennrich et al. PRL 85, 4872 (2000); Kuhn et al. PRL 89, 67901 (2002)

[4] McKeever et al. Nature 425, 268 (2003)