FRACTIONAL REVIVALS IN THE JAYNES-CUMMINGS MODEL

It is shown that the phenomenon of fractional revivals, which was observed in recent laser experiments on atomic wave packets, determines the long-time behavior of the Jaynes-Cummings model for a two-level atom interacting with a quantized cavity field. This provides an alternative mechanism for the generation of coherent superpositions of macroscopically distinguishable states of the field (so-called "optical Schrodinger cats") via resonant processes. The emergence of these states is associated with the appearance of atomic inversion revivals following each other 2, 3, 4,... times faster than the usual ones.