ua nt - p h / 99 04 06 7 v 1 1 6 A pr 1 99 9 Dressed - State Approach to Population Trapping in the Jaynes - Cummings Model

The phenomenon of atomic population trapping in the Jaynes-Cummings Model is analysed from a dressed-state point of view. A general condition for the occurrence of partial or total trapping from an arbitrary, pure initial atom-field state is obtained in the form of a bound to the variation of the atomic inversion. More generally, it is found that in the presence of initial atomic or atom-field coherence the population dynamics is governed not by the field's initial photon distribution, but by a 'weighted dressedness' distribution characterising the joint atom-field state. In particular, individual revivals in the inversion can be analytically described to good approximation in terms of that distribution, even in the limit of large population trapping. This result is obtained through a generalisation of the Poisson Summation Formula method for analytical description of revivals developed by Fleischhauer and Schleich