Abstract

We examine in detail a new scheme put forward recently by us for the preparation of Fock states and coherent super-position states of light in a cavity.¹ Our scheme involves the passage of an atom (or atoms) with Zeeman substructure through overlapping cavity and laser fields and is based upon the adiabatic evolution of eigenstates of the coupled laser-atom-cavity system, given a certain time sequence of fields as seen by the atom passing through the interaction region (in particular, the cavity field must precede the laser field and the time variation of both fields should be smooth).²

© 1994 IEEE