Stimulated emission for a three-level artificial atom in waveguide quantum electrodynamics

This work is devoted to a theoretical study of the interaction of a quantum three-level ladder system with a continuous electromagnetic field in a one-dimensional open waveguide. We consider a situation closely resembling stimulated emission - the scattering of a single-photon exponential pulse by an excited three-level emitter. Using the real-space formalism, we obtain an analytical expression for the wavefunction of our system. We show that, for the low anharmonicity of a three-level system inherent to a transmon (the most common type of artificial atom), the influence of the third level can have a significant effect on the system's behavior. Namely, the presence of the third level largely suppresses the stimulated emission effect if the relative anharmonicity is lower than α r < 4%. However, for a three-level system, it is possible to obtain correlation effects such as photon bunching in the reflected field, which can also be 'switched off' by tuning the incident photon parameters.