Abstract

We study the resonance fluorescence dynamics of a driven three-level atom in a "V"-configuration in which one transition is to a strongly fluorescing level and the other transition is to a metastable shelving state (see Fig. 1). This is the configuration in which quantum jumps, periods of bright fluorescence randomly interrupted by periods of darkness, have been studied experimentally using single three-level trapped ions.¹ We consider the conditioned evolution of such a system when the information gained through observation is either from direct photon counting or from heterodyne measurements, using the Monte Carlo wavefunction simulation methods recently developed to desribe the evolution of single quantum systems.^2–4 We concentrate on mean values for populations and intensities and also correlation functions for sequential detection of decay photons.

© 1994 IEEE