Stroboscopic dynamics of the micromaser
Ravinder Rupchand Puri, Fritz Haake, Dieter Forster · Journal of the Optical Society of America B · 1996
The successive passage of excited atoms through a micromaser suggests a stroboscopic description. Surprisingly, such a treatment is simpler than its various, more familiar continuous-time approximations. An especially interesting result arises for the longest time scale of approach to equilibrium, which in continuous-time dynamics would appear as being due to barrier hopping and/or tunneling.