Stimulated Emission of Radiation in a Single Mode

Recently Glauber has described the properties of coherent radiation fields, and has constructed the density matrix of the field in two simple cases: (1) The radiating system is a classical radiator and no reaction is considered; (2) the central-limit theorem applies to a collection of radiators. This paper investigates other simple "almost" exactly soluble problems, in which a quantum-mechanical two-level system interacts with a quantized electromagnetic field originally in a pure coherent state in a single mode. The first-order correlation function G^ (1) =〈E^-E^+〉 is compared with 〈E^-〉〈E^+〉 at resonance when the stimulating field is initially a pure coherent state and the two-level system is initially in its excited state. The corresponding quantities are also computed for a field whose initial density matrix is a Gaussian superposition of coherent states (e. g. , blackbody radiation), as well as for a field which is initially described as having a given number of photons.