Introduction

In 1963, E. T. Jaynes and F. W. Cummings published a paper entitled “Comparison of Quantum and Semiclassical Radiation Theories, with Application to the Beam Maser.” This paper was written at a time when the quantum theory of the laser had not yet been worked out, and represented an attempt at discussing the new behaviour that could be expected from treating the field quantum mechanically instead of classically. Jaynes and Cummings began by considering the interaction between a single two-level molecule and a single field mode, a simple situation which has become known as the Jaynes-Cummings model. Treating then the maser medium as a beam of two-level systems initially in a mixture of their upper and lower states characterized by a temperature T, they found that the field mode reached a thermal equilibrium with temperature Tf = ΩT/ω, where ω is the transition frequency of the two-level systems and Ω is the field mode frequency, provided that T > 0. For T < 0, the steady state field was found to contain an infinite amount of energy, an unphysical result resulting from the neglect of losses in the model. Jaynes and Cummings then proceeded to develop an alternative semi-classical theory of the beam maser, introducing their famous neo-classical theory of spontaneous emission.

An important follow-up paper was published by F. W. Cummings, who studied the long-time behavior of a two-level system interacting with a quantized single-mode field initially in a coherent state.