Two-level atom excitation probability for single- and $N$-photon wavepackets

Abstract

We study how the transient excitation probability of a two-level atom by a quantized field depends on the temporal profile of the incident pulse, in the presence of external losses, for both coherent and Fock states, and in two complementary limits: when the pulse contains only one photon (on average), and when the number of photons $N$ is large. For the latter case we derive analytical expressions for the scaling of the excitation probability with $N$ that can be easily evaluated for any pulse shape.