A fully quantum mechanical approach to the nonlinear interaction in two photon pulses at an atom-cavity system

摘要

The nonlinearity of two-level atomic systems can be sensitive to individual photons. In order to apply such an atomic nonlinearity to photon manipulation, e.g. for quantum information processing, it is important to understand the precise spatiotemporal coherence of the input and output photons. This cannot be fully achieved by theories that eliminate the quantum state of the field outside the atom-cavity system.