A study of multiatom effects, i.e., dipole-dipole interactions and phase-interrupting collisions between atoms in the Jaynes-Cummings model, is presented here. For this purpose we consider two identical two-level atoms interacting with a single-mode field in a lossless cavity and study the effect of the dipole-dipole interaction between these two atoms on the collapse-and-revival phenomenon of Rabi oscillations by calculating the analytical expression of the excitation probability in the coherent field. We also consider another situation in which a single atom interacting with a single-mode field in a damped cavity undergoes phase-interrupting collisions. The effect of phase-interrupting collisions along with the usual cavity damping on the collapse-and-revival phenomenon has been explicitly calculated using the dressed-atom approach under the secular approximation.

• Received 30 January 1991

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.44.2135