Stimulated Emission of Radiation in a Single Mode

Abstract

Recently Glauber has described the properties of coherent radiation fields, and has constructed the density matrix of the field in two simple cases: (1) The radiating system is a classical radiator and no reaction is considered; (2) the central-limit theorem applies to a collection of radiators. This paper investigates other simple "almost" exactly soluble problems, in which a quantum-mechanical two-level system interacts with a quantized electromagnetic field originally in a pure coherent state in a single mode. The first-order correlation function ${G}^{(1)}=〈{E}^{\ensuremath{-}}{E}^{+}〉$ is compared with $〈{E}^{\ensuremath{-}}〉〈{E}^{+}〉$ at resonance when the stimulating field is initially a pure coherent state and the two-level system is initially in its excited state. The corresponding quantities are also computed for a field whose initial density matrix is a Gaussian superposition of coherent states (e.g., blackbody radiation), as well as for a field which is initially described as having a given number of photons.