Competing three-photon and one-photon transitions in cavity quantum electrodynamics

We examine a model of two-channel cavity quantum electrodynamics (QED) consisting of three-photon and one-photon absorption processes, i.e., we present a cavity-QED version of a nonlinear optical balance. We give detailed numerical results for the evolution of the atomic populations and the number of photons at the fundamental and third harmonic frequencies. We also show the behavior of the system if the fields are treated semiclassically, and we find the quantum effects to be rather dominant