The non-dissipative damping of the Rabi oscillations as a “which-path” information

Rabi oscillations may be viewed as an interference phenomenon due to acoherent superposition of different quantum paths, like in the Young's two-slitexperiment. The inclusion of the atomic external variables causes a nondissipative damping of the Rabi oscillations. More generally, the atomictranslational dynamics induces damping in the correlation functions whichdescribe non classical behaviors of the field and internal atomic variables,leading to the separability of these two subsystems. We discuss on thepossibility of interpreting this intrinsic decoherence as a "which-way"information effect and we apply to this case a quantitative analysis of thecomplementarity relation as introduced by Englert [Phys. Rev. Lett.\textbf{77}, 2154 (1996)].