The 1996 experiment by Brune et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 76, 1800 (1996)] on vacuum Rabi oscillation is analyzed by means of alternative models of atom-reservoir interaction. Agreement with experimental Rabi oscillation data can be obtained if one defines jump operators in the dressed-state basis and takes into account thermal fluctuations between dressed states belonging to the same manifold. Such low-frequency transitions could...

The paper continues the analysis of vacuum Rabi oscillations we started in part I [Phys. Rev. A 79, 033836 (2009)]. Here we concentrate on experimental consequences for cavity QED of two different classes of representations of harmonic-oscillator Lie algebras. The zero-temperature master equation, derived in part I for irreducible representations of the algebra, is reformulated in a reducible representation that models electromagnetic...