Manipulation of Cavity Field States with Multi-Level Atoms

Abstract

Recently, we have proposed two schemes to manipulate a quantum state of a single-mode cavity field in a controlled way by sending two-level atoms through a cavity.1,2 In one of these schemes1 a desired cavity field state is build up step by step starting from the vacuum state. Two-level atoms are prepared in a coherent superposition of the lower state and the upper state. Then the atomic coherence is transfered to the cavity field. As a two-level atom can deposit at most one photon in the cavity, we need N atoms to prepare an arbitrary superposition of N + 1 Fock states. However, probabilities enter because all two-level atoms must be detected in the lower state after they have interacted with the cavity field. In this paper we show that the idea can be generalized to atoms with more than two levels. The main advantage of this generalization is that a single atom can transfer a larger amount of coherence to the cavity field.