Cavity cooling of atoms: a quantum statistical treatment
András Vukics, József Janszky, P. Domokos · Journal of Physics B Atomic Molecular and Optical Physics · 2005
A fully quantum mechanical solution of the dissipative motion of an atomic centre-of-mass strongly coupled to a dynamically varying cavity field mode is presented. Beyond the statistical properties, such as the temperature and localization of the atom, the coherence properties of the atomic wave packet and its entanglement to the cavity field are calculated. The latter is the source of a nonclassical photon statistics expressed in terms of the Mandel Q parameter. The trapping time of an atom initially localized in a potential well is found to significantly deviate from the semiclassically expected results, which we attribute to the graininess of the photon field.