Photon antibunching and non-Poissonian fluorescence of a single three-level ion
Michael Schubert, Ingo Siemers, R. Blatt, Werner Neuhauser, P. E. Toschek · Physical Review Letters · 1992
The photon pair correlation in the laser-excited fluorescence of a single trapped and cooled ${\mathrm{Ba}}^{+}$ ion shows antibunching and, in addition, novel nonclassical phenomena absent in the fluorescence of two-level atoms. They include excessive transient values of the correlation caused by optical pumping, and temporally extended sub-Poissonian photon emission probability which arises from the transient excitation of nonabsorbing Raman coherence. The fluorescence also displays sub-Poissonian photon statistics.