Mixing properties of the one-atom maser

Abstract

We study the relaxation properties of the quantized electromagnetic field in a cavity under repeated interactions with single two-level atoms, so-called one-atom maser. We improve the ergodic results obtained in [BP] and prove that, whenever the atoms are initially distributed according to the canonical ensemble at temparature T>0, all the invariant states are mixing. Under some non-resonance condition this invariant state is known to be thermal equilibirum at some renormalized temperature T* and we prove that the mixing is then arbitrarily slow, in other words that there is no lower bound on the relaxation speed.