Photon correlations and successive emission
M. S. Kim, P. L. Knight · Physical Review A · 1989
We describe the coherence properties of light emitted by driven atoms in terms of dressed-atom survival amplitudes. Such amplitudes can be used to construct analytic expressions for the function describing the delay between successive photon emissions and used to construct the appropriate radiation correlation functions. This approach is used to calculate the radiative dynamics of three-level atoms appropriate to recent quantum-jump experiments. We contrast our simple approach to that normally employed which relies on the numerical solutions of density-matrix equations of motion followed by the application of the quantum-regression theorem.