PHOTON-STATISTICS DEPENDENCE OF SINGLE-ATOM ABSORPTION

We use the theory of cascaded open systems to calculate the transmitte d photon flux for a weak beam of photons focused onto a single, resona nt two-state atom in the narrow-bandwidth limit. We study the dependen ce of the transmitted flux on the quantum statistics of the incident l ight. Sources of coherent, chaotic, squeezed, antibunched chaotic, and antibunched coherent light are considered. We find that the second-or der correlation function and frequency dependence in the wings of the spectrum of the incident light must be-considered to explain the resul ts.