Time evolution of atomic inversion in a standing wave light field

The interaction between an atomic beam of two-level atoms and a standing wave light field has been studied by the exact solution of a time-dependent quantum system developed recently. When the initial atomic state is choosen to be ground, we find that with the limit of zero detuning the atoms will oscillate between the upper and the lower levels with a decaying amplitude. The most interesting result obtained in this paper is when the initial atomic state is a particular superposition of the two levels, now the system does not oscillate at any time.