On the indistinguishability of Raman photons

We provide a theoretical framework to study the effect of dephasing on the quantum indistinguishability of single photons emitted from a coherently driven cavity QED Λ-system. We show that with a large excited-state detuning, the photon indistinguishability can be drastically improved provided that the fluctuation rate of the noise source affecting the excited state is fast compared with the photon emission rate. In some cases a spectral filter is required to realize this improvement, but the cost in efficiency can be made small.