Propagators of the Jaynes-Cummings model in open systems

Abstract

We present a propagator formalism to investigate the scattering of photons by a cavity QED system that consists of a single two-level atom dressed by a leaky optical cavity field. We establish a diagrammatic method to construct the propagator analytically. This allows us to determine the quantum state of the scattered photons for an arbitrary incident photon packet. As an application, we explicitly solve the problem of a single-photon packet scattered by an initially excited atom.