Abstract

We study squeezing in electromagnetic field quadrature components, produced by a collection of A two-level atoms interacting with a single mode of a strong electromagnetic field. We present analytic results both for short and long interaction times. At short times, squeezing grows with the number of atoms for a given initial number of photons. The maximum squeezing which can be achieved in a strong-field case is 66%. At long interaction times, collective effects increase the quadrature fluctuations, compared to the single-atom case. However, for a given number of atoms A, any initial pure atomic state exhibits squeezing when the mean photon number of the initial coherent field satisfies the condition n?>(2A) 4. At times close to the first revival, strong squeezing can be achieved for special initial atomic conditions.