Resonance fluorescence of a two-level atom in an off-resonance squeezed vacuum

Abstract

The authors present analytical and numerical results for resonance fluorescence produced by a two-level atom damped by a broad-band squeezed vacuum. Previous theoretical analyses of this model have assumed that the laser frequency and the carrier frequency of the squeezed vacuum are equal. The authors introduce a non-zero detuning between the laser frequency and the carrier frequency while maintaining resonance between the laser frequency and atomic resonance. In the absence of the driving field there is a squeezing threshold: above threshold the decay rate of the atomic polarization can be reduced, and below threshold a squeezing-induced two peak spectrum and frequency shift, which is analogous to the Bloch-Siegert shift, are predicted. In the presence of the driving field, the spectrum is asymmetric for Rabi frequencies smaller or comparable to the detuning of the squeezed vacuum. A symmetric spectrum is obtained for large Rabi frequencies. An interpretation is predicted by means of a dressed-state analysis. The authors find that for not too large Rabi frequencies a remarkably large population inversion can be induced in the dressed states, even at exact resonance of the driving field, provided that the laser frequency and carrier frequency are detuned. Moreover, for detection times larger than the inverse detuning, the spectrum is insensitive to the phase between the driving field and the squeezed vacuum, in marked contrast to the case of no detuning.