Stimulated emission via quantum interference: scattering of one-photon packets on an atom in a ground state

Usually it is assumed that the stimulated emission appears as a consequence of the Bose-Einstein statistics of photons and that to observe this effect at least two excitations have to be initially present in the atom-field system. That is, both the atom and the electromagnetic field have to be excited. In this paper we show that stimulated emission can appear exclusively as a consequence of quantum interference in a system with just a single excitation. Specifically, we consider a single two-level atom which is initially in its lower energy state and it interacts with a single-photon multi-mode wave packet. We show that for a proper choice of the photon-wave packet the atom can exhibit stimulated emission.