Conditional nonclassical field generation in cavity QED

We introduce a method for the conditional generation of nonclassical states of light in a cavity. We consider two-level atoms traveling along the transverse direction to the cavity axis and show that by conditioning on one of the output measurements nonclassical field states are generated. The two-level atoms are prepared in the ground state and we conditioned them on the events in which they are also detected in the ground state. Nonclassical properties of the cavity mode are identified and characterized. This includes quadrature squeezing, sub-Poissonian photon-number distributions, and negative Wigner functions. We determine the optimal parameter regions where the corresponding nonclassical features are most distinct.