Abstract

While the problem of photon antibunching in optical bistability has been the subject of numerous theoretical investigations, there appears to be no general result in the literature that includes a complete specification of the dependence of antibunching on the system parameters. Motivated by the importance of such a result to experimental observation of this effect, we present a treatment that includes the parametric dependences on cavity and atomic detunings, cooperativity parameter, nonradiative (collisional) damping, and the ratio of cavity and atomic damping rates. We also attempt to analyze the contribution of fourth-order correlations of the fluctuating fields, which have been neglected in previous treatments. Although the antibunching initially increases with decreasing system size due to the approximate scaling of quantum fluctuations as the inverse of the saturation photon number n_s, higher-order fluctuations begin playing an increasingly important role at values of n_s ⪝ 1. We show that the linearized theory itself does not necessarily break down for arbitrarily small values of n_s (as previously suggested), but that photon antibunching is lost in this limit, thus placing restrictions on the design of an experiment.

© 1988 Optical Society of America