Waiting times, probabilities and theQfactor of fluorescent photons
Henk F. Arnoldus, Robertsen A. Riehle · Journal of Modern Optics · 2012
Photons in resonance fluorescence from a single atom are correlated, and this affects the photon detection statistics. We consider the time dependence of the variance for the number of counts in a time interval [0, T], and we show that there exist Poisson points for certain values of the atomic parameters. At these points, the variance equals the average, like for a Poisson process. We also show that the conditional probability density for the detection of the nth photon after a detection of a photon at time zero can be obtained from the conditional probability density for the first photon, and we illustrate this by computing several conditional probability densities for a special case of interest. The unconditional probability density for the detection of the nth photon can be obtained from the conditional probability densities and the probability for detecting n photons in [0, T] can subsequently be found from the unconditional probability densities.