ONE-ATOM MASER - PHASE-SENSITIVE MEASUREMENTS

We reconsider a variant of the one-atom-maser setup in which the emerg ing atoms are probed for coherent superpositions of the two Rydberg st ates of the maser transition. The statistical properties of the corres ponding detector clicks contain information about the temporal evoluti on of the phase of the quantized electromagnetic field inside the reso nator. We derive analytical expressions for certain statistical quanti ties, such as the mean number of successive clicks of the same kind, o r the atom-atom and the photon-photon correlation functions. The latte r are closely related if the photon-number distribution in steady stat e is dominated by a single narrow peak.