Route toward the ideal thresholdless laser
S. M. Dutra, J. P. Woerdman, Jorrit Visser, Gerard Nienhuis · Physical Review A · 2002
We consider what happens to a laser when all incoherent processes are reduced to the minimum needed to keep emission irreversible. Specifically, we investigate the case where the vacuum Rabi frequency is larger than any decay rate in the laser except for the atomic polarization decay rate. Using a fully quantum description, we show that this laser can be made to go continuously from a regime with a well-defined threshold to the ideal thresholdless regime, where the photon statistics is always Poissonian even for arbitrarily small pump powers. We suggest how a proof-of-principles experiment can be realized in the microwave domain.