Telling emissions apart in a multiphoton resonance: visualizing a conditional evolution

Abstract

We find that the phase-space representation of the electromagnetic field inside a driven cavity strongly coupled to a two-level atom can be employed to distinguish photon emissions along a ladder of dressed states sustaining a two-photon resonance. The emissions are told apart by means of the different quantum beats generated by the conditional states they prepare. Sample quantum trajectories explicitly reveal the difference in the transient due to the initial condition, in a background set by the Jaynes–Cummings spectrum and revealed by the strong-coupling limit. Their ensemble-averaged evolution is tracked for a time period similar to that waited for the loss of a next photon as the maximum non-exclusive probability, indicated by the peak of the intensity correlation function.