The single atom laser: a quantized Rabi oscillator

Summary form only given. We have recently developed the first working single-atom microlaser in which coherent light is generated by means of the interaction of a single two-level atom with a single mode of the radiation field. The photon generation process follows the Jaynes-Cummings model, and photon buildup is initiated by vacuum Rabi oscillations, not by spontaneous emission as in conventional lasers. We measured the mean photon number in the cavity (n) as a function of the average number of atoms present there . Laser oscillation was observed with as small as 0.1, resulting in (n) of 0.1.