Abstract

The effect of non-Poissonian pump fluctuations on the micromaser dynamics has attracted a great deal of interest recently. It has been investigated by two, seemingly unrelated, theoretical approaches. The first employs a discrete non-Poissonian pumping process /1/ where the pump atoms are allowed to arrive, with certain probability p, only at regularly spaced instants of time , while the second is based on continuous (and stationary) non-Poissonian pumping /2, 3/. In this contribution we present a unified approach which is based on a generalization of the latter and can handle both situations on an equal footing. The resulting field dynamics is manifestly non-Markovian except for the case of a strictly Poissonian pumping process. For a micromaser with discrete non-Poissonian pumping we show explicitly the equivalence of ensemble averaging and time averaging, providing a rare example where the validity of the ergodic hypothesis can be explicitly demonstrated.

© 1996 IEEE