Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-laser-science-and-quantum-information-processing-course-of-the-university-of-oxford/2018/3/c/solution

Project the field onto the five-photon number state. The excited-atom contribution comes from the initial block, while the ground-atom contribution comes from the initial block. The unnormalized conditional atomic state is
Thus the five-count probability and normalized post-measurement state are
The relative free-evolution phase is physically retained; it is absent only in an explicitly rotating atomic frame. The conditional state is defined when . In particular, an initial vacuum cannot produce five photons in this one-atom model, so that conditioning event has probability zero when .

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