Fractional revivals in the Jaynes-Cummings model
Ilya Sh. Averbukh · Physical Review A · 1992
It is shown that the phenomenon of fractional revivals, which was observed in recent laser experiments on atomic wave packets, determines the long-time behavior of the Jaynes-Cummings model for a two-level atom interacting with a quantized cavity field. This provides an alternative mechanism for the generation of coherent superpositions of macroscopically distinguishable states of the field (so-called ``optical Schr\"odinger cats'') via resonant processes. The emergence of these states is associated with the appearance of atomic inversion revivals following each other 2, 3, 4, . . . times faster than the usual ones.