Abstract

We investigate the possibility of "purifying" a thermal field in a lossless micromaser system by transferring coherence from the atoms to the field. It was shown recently that the interaction of a thermal field with an atom with a dipole [(i.e., with an initial atomic state given by | ϕ > = a | g> + b | e>, where | e> (| g>) denotes excited (ground) state)] could make the field entropy lower (for certain times) than its initial value.¹

© 1994 IEEE