Quantum jumps in a three-level system

The authors study fluorescence in a scheme which is easy to treat theoretically: a two-level system driven by a laser and a third metastable state such that slow spontaneous transitions take place both from the excited state of a two-level system to the metastable state and from the metastable state to the ground state of the two-level system. With the aid of the quantum regression theorem the authors calculate the whole photon counting statistics at a detector which records scattering of the laser photons. In the limit of high intensity of the laser, the statistics of photon counts is found to be the same as the statistics of a two-state Markov jumps process. Thus, if the sequence of photon counts can be interpreted as a realization of a stochastic process, in a single experimental run the fluorescence should abruptly turn on and off for random intervals of time. The result is the same as given by the quantum-jump argument