The behavior of an atomic double lambda system in the presence of a strong
off-resonant classical field and a few-photon resonant quantum field is
examined. It is shown that the system possesses properties that allow a
single-photon state to be distilled from a multi-photon input wave packet. In
addition, the system is also capable of functioning as an efficient
photodetector discriminating between one- and two-photon wave packets with
arbitrarily high efficiency.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure