Abstract

We recently reported that the transmitted light from a driven optical cavity containing a single-atom absorber shows strong nonclassical features.¹ Also, Savage and Carmichael² have shown that this single-atom system can be operated in a regime in which the transmitted light has a bimodal photon-counting distribution; as the saturation photon number is increased this bimodality develops into a single-atom version of absorptive optical bistability. We present results for the degree of second-order coherence and the spectrum of the transmitted light in the operating regime at the onset of bimodality. In this regime we can study the onset of low frequency behavior associated with transitions between the local states defined by the peaks of the bimodal distribution. Our results are calculated numerically, using a supercomputer to solve matrix element equations derived in the Fock-state basis. Our numerical approach also allows us to extend our analytical study of nonclassical effects in single-atom cavity-enhanced absorption. Our analytical results are restricted either to the bad-cavity limit¹ or to weak driving fields outside this limit. We can now study how the nonclassical effects identified in these analytical calculations are changed by using finite driving fields outside the bad-cavity limit.

© 1988 Optical Society of America