Numerical studies of the mesomaser

We present systematic numerical studies of the regularly pumped mesomaser. The mesomaser is a generalization of the micromaser in that more than one atom can be present at any given time in the cavity. We treat from one to five atoms present in a regular pump-scheme in which the atoms arrive individually and equidistantly in time. We find that in the limit of more photons than atoms (N_ex>N, N_ex setting the scale of the photon number and N being the number of atoms), for small Rabi angles Θ, and for a nonvanishing temperature (thermal photon number n¯≳0.1), the quasi-steady-state photon number changes little as a function of N (for correctly scaled other parameters), whereas the variance of the photon number for certain Rabi-angles Θ exhibits a clear linear dependence on N. This extra contribution due to the many-particle aspect of the problem scales as N/N_ex, thus becoming large when the number of atoms N approaches the scale N_ex of the photon number. © 1996 The American Physical Society.