On the polarization properties of one-atom micromasers

The Jaynes-Cummings model describing the interaction of a single linearly polarized mode of the quantized electromagnetic field with an isolated two-level atom is generalized to the case of atomic levels degenerate in the projections of the angular momenta on the quantization axis, which is a usual case in the experiments. This generalization, like the original model, obtains the explicit solution. The model is applied to calculate the dependence of the cavity field characteristics on the angle between the polarization of the cavity field mode and that of the laser excitation pulse in the experiment with one-atom micromaser. It is shown that the polarization of the excitation pulse may be varied to govern the cavity field parameters, for example, to increase the average number of photons in the cavity or to switch the photon statistics from sub- to super-Poissonian.