Photon-statistics dependence of single-atom absorption

Abstract

We use the theory of cascaded open systems to calculate the transmitted photon flux for a weak beam of photons focused onto a single, resonant two-state atom in the narrow-bandwidth limit. We study the dependence of the transmitted flux on the quantum statistics of the incident light. Sources of coherent, chaotic, squeezed, antibunched chaotic, and antibunched coherent light are considered. We find that the second-order correlation function and frequency dependence in the wings of the spectrum of the incident light must be considered to explain the results.