Dynamics of dispersive photon-number QND measurements in a micromaser

A numerical analysis of dispersive quantum nondemolition measurement of the photon number of a microwave cavity field is presented. Simulations show that a key property of the dispersive atom-field interaction used in Ramsey interferometry is the extremely high sensitivity of the dynamics of atomic and field states to basic parameters of the system. When a monokinetic atomic beam is sent through a microwave cavity, a qualitative change in the field state can be caused by an uncontrollably small deviation of parameters (such as atom path length through the cavity, atom velocity, cavity mode frequency detuning, or atom-field coupling constants). The resulting cavity field can be either in a Fock state or in a super-Poissonian state (characterized by a large photon-number variance). When the atoms have a random velocity spread, the field is squeezed to a Fock state for arbitrary values of the system’s parameters. However, this makes detection of Ramsey fringes impossible, because the probability of detecting an atom in the upper or lower electronic state becomes a random quantity almost uniformly distributed over the interval between zero and unity, irrespective of the cavity photon number.