Mazer action in a bimodal cavity

Abstract

The work of Meyer, Scully, and Walther [Phys. Rev. A 56, 4142 (1997)] is generalized to study the operation of a two-mode mazer with particular reference to the question of mode-mode correlations. The explicit expression for the detailed balance steady-state photon distribution has been derived. It is shown that the two-mode mazer exhibits much stronger sub-Poissonian statistics for each mode. The photon-number distributions are found to be quite sensitive to the presence of blackbody photons in the cavity. The interferences among contributions from different dressed states enable one to obtain the phase of the transmission amplitude of finding the atom in the initial excited state by considering a set of two measurements involving two different initial states of the atom-field system.