Abstract

The quantum statistics of bistable systems have been studied since the beginnings of optical bistability theory. Predicted quantum-statistical effects include quantum induced transitions between states, evidences of atomic collectivity in the transmitted spectrum, photon antibunching, and squeezing.⁽¹⁾ The enthusiasm shown in theoretical analyses of these phenomena has not been matched by experiments, however; one reason being that the effects are very small, generally scaling with the size of the system (in this squeezing is an exception) as measured by saturation photon number n_S or number of atoms N. The recent experiments of Rosenberger et al.,⁽²⁾ which closely meet the idealized conditions called for by theory have n_s ~ 10³ and N ~ 10⁵. While these numbers are too large, these experiments suggest that it might be feasible to measure quantum-statistical effects in a new generation of smaller systems. This paper addresses theoretical questions raised by a move to small systems. Existing theories are themselves restricted by assumptions of large system size, invoked to justify their various truncation, factorization and linearization procedures.

© 1985 Optical Society of America