We study the influence of the atomic spontaneous-emission decay on the collapse-revival phenomena in the optical region. We demonstrate that revivals of the atomic inversion are much more sensitive to cavity-field damping than to spontaneous emission. This suggests that the additional dissipation caused by spontaneous emission would not offer an insurmountable obstacle to the experimental observation of optical revivals in high-Q cavities.PACS number(s): 42.50.Dv, 42.52. +x, 32.80.t Present address:
A three-level atom with two competing transitions can sense correlations between modes of an electromagnetic field with which it interacts. We examine the sensitivity of three-level atoms in ladder, A, and V configurations to correlations between modes in a broadband correlated reservoir of field modes. Our model of a correlated reservoir includes pairwise mode correlations around a center frequency.When such correlations are set to zero, the reservoir becomes a simple thermal heat bath, but in the opposite extreme when the modes are perfectly correlated, we recover a minimum-uncertainty broadband squeezed vacuum. We show that atomic populations are extremely sensitive to these correlations, and can, in the ladder system, become inverted as a result of the phase-sensitive noise. We also show how atomic population trapping is affected by mode correlations.
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