Induced Rabi oscillations and revivals in the presence of dissipation

The “time reversal” dynamics of dissipative atom-cavity systems has been recently experimentally investigated. We model the experimental procedure using semiclassical approximations which allow for analytical results and to distinguish decoherence from damping effects. We show that the basic effect of decoherence is to drastically alter the envelope of the population inversion, mainly the amplitude. Damping, on the other hand, is responsible for the anticipation of the revival times and corrections to the fast frequencies in each envelope.