Mazer action in a bimodal cavity - art. no. 023809

The work of Meyer, Scully, and Walther [Phys. Rev. A 56, 4142 (1997)] is ge neralized to study the operation of a two-mode mazer with particular refere nce to the question of mode-mode correlations. The explicit expression for the detailed balance steady-state photon distribution has been derived. It is shown that the two-mode mazer exhibits much stronger sub-Poissonian stat istics for each mode. The photon-number distributions are found to be quite sensitive to the presence of blackbody photons in the cavity. The interfer ences among contributions from different dressed states enable one to obtai n the phase of the transmission amplitude of finding the atom in the initia l excited state by considering a set of two measurements involving two diff erent initial states of the atom-field system.