Probing the dressed states of an atom interacting with a quantized field

Abstract

The analytical form of the fluorescence spectrum produced by an atom in an ideal cavity is analysed using the infinity of transitions among the dressed states of the Jaynes-Cummings model. These transitions lead to a large number of resonances in the spectra, the actual form of which depends on the quantum statistics of the field in the cavity. We present results for both chaotic and coherent input fields. We show that the fine structure associated with the transitions among dressed states survives even after averaging over the initial quantum statistics. Finally we examine the resonant structures that survive in a realistic cavity with finite but very large Q. We also show how these results yield the absorption spectra.