Quantum beats revisited: a quantum jump approach

The term quantum beats refers to a superposed oscillatory behaviour in the light intensity emitted by some suddenly excited atomic systems in their subsequent decay. In this paper we reinvestigate quantum beats for systems where two upper levels may decay to a common ground state by using the recently developed approach of quantum jumps. The treatment turns out to be very simple and intuitive. It gives explicit expressions for the time-dependent intensity of the radiating system and allows us to exhibit several phenomena which so far seem to have been overlooked. We show that quantum beats may also occur if only one of the upper levels is initially excited, a superposition is not needed. A possible experimental set-up for the verification of this effect is proposed. It is also shown that in some cases the beat frequency may differ considerably from the separation delta omega of the upper levels. For equal Einstein coefficients of the upper levels the beats are shown to be unexpectedly absent for small delta omega .