Interrupted fluorescence, quantum jumps, and wave-function collapse

Abstract

The phenomenon of antibunching provides important support for the physical principle of the collapse of the wave function following a detection of a photon. In this paper we show that interrupted fluorescence in a three-level, V-configuration atom, with one transition strongly driven and one weakly driven, can be regarded as evidence supporting the complementary principle of ‘‘collapse by nondetection.’’ Use of this principle leads to the immediate deduction of remarkably simple general expressions for the average bright and dark periods, which allows these quantities to be calculated for both coherent and incoherent excitation without the need to solve the density-matrix equations, or even to find their long-term steady-state solutions. Thus the concept of collapse by nondetection appears to be not only valid but is also useful for predicting physically observable phenomena.