Photon number variance in isolated cavities

Abstract

We consider a strictly isolated single-mode optical cavity resonating at angular frequency omega containing atoms whose one-electron level energies are supposed to be: hbar*omega, 2*hbar*omega,...B*hbar\omega, and m photons. If initially the atoms are in their highest energy state and m=0, we find that at equilibrium: variance(m)/mean(m)=(B+1)/6, indicating that the internal field statistics is sub-Poissonian if the number of atomic levels B does not exceed 4. Remarkably, this result does not depend on the number of atoms, nor on the number of electrons that each atom incorporates. Our result has application to the statistics of the light emitted by pulsed lasers and nuclear magnetic resonance. On the mathematical side, the result is based on the restricted partitions of integers.