Control and chaos of atomic Rabi oscillations in a cavity

The semiclassical dynamics of an ensemble of two-level atoms interacting with a single-mode cavity field is investigated. Without any dissipation, the respective dynamical system is shown to be integrable with atoms at rest inside a cavity. A new coherent effect of population trapping is shown to occur in the integrable system under specific initial conditions. The effect of dissipation on the trapping is treated numerically. It is shown analytically that homoclinic Hamiltonian chaos may arise when atoms move through a cavity