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arXiv:1808.08415

Collective Mode Interferences in Light--Matter Interactions

Robert J. Bettles, Teodora Ilieva, Hannes Busche, Paul H. Huillery, Simon W. Ball, Nicholas L. R. Spong, Charles S. Adams

Published Aug 25, 2018• 8 citations
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Abstract

We present a theoretical and experimental analysis of transient optical properties of a dense cold atomic gas. After the rapid extinction of a weak coherent driving field (mean photon number $\sim 1.5$), a transient `flash' is observed. Surprisingly the decay of the `flash' is faster than the decay of the fastest superradiant mode of the system. We show that this `faster than superradiance decay' is expected due to the interference between collective eigenmodes that exhibit a range of frequency shifts away from the bare atomic transition. Experimental results confirm that the initial decay rate of the superradiant flash increases with optical depth, in agreement with the numerical simulations for the experimental conditions.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.1808.08415

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We present a theoretical and experimental analysis of transient optical properties of a dense cold atomic gas. After the rapid extinction of a weak coherent driving field (mean photon number ∼1.5\sim 1.5∼1.5), a transient flash' is observed. Surprisingly the decay of the flash' is faster than the decay of the fastest superradiant mode of the system. We show that this `faster than superradiance decay' is expected due to the interference between collective eigenmodes that exhibit a range of frequency shifts away from the bare atomic transition. Experimental results confirm that the initial decay rate of the superradiant flash increases with optical depth, in agreement with the numerical simulations for the experimental conditions.
In this work we present a numerical and experimental investigation of the collective early-time decay rates of a strongly driven and optically dense cold atomic cloud. We prepare the atomic ensemble by driving the system to its steady state with varying Rabi frequencies ΩΩΩ that go from the weak Ω≪ΓΩ\ll ΓΩ≪Γ to the strong driving regime Ω≫ΓΩ\gg ΓΩ≫Γ, where ΓΓΓ is the single-atom decay rate. We investigate the early-time dynamics in the transition between the strong and weak driving regimes using: i) angular-dependent observables such as the light emitted by the cloud, and ii) global observables, i.e., the excited state population. When driving the cloud on-resonance, we find that as a function of the driving frequency, the behavior of the collected light at certain angles transitions from the single-photon subradiant regime to a superradiant regime while the behavior of the excited state population does not show superradiance. The experiment shows good agreement with numerical predictions in the regime of parameters under study.
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We study the emergence of a collective optical response of a cold and dense 87Rb^{87}\mathrm{Rb}87Rb atomic cloud to a near-resonant low-intensity light when the atom number is gradually increased. Experimental observations are compared with microscopic stochastic simulations of recurrent scattering processes between the atoms that incorporate the atomic multilevel structure and the optical measurement setup. We analyze the optical response of an inhomogeneously broadened gas and find that the experimental observations of the resonance line shifts and the total collected scattered light intensity in cold atom clouds substantially deviate from those of thermal atomic ensembles, indicating strong light-induced resonant dipole-dipole interactions between the atoms. At high densities, the simulations also predict a significantly slower decay of light-induced excitations in cold than in thermal atom clouds. The role of dipole-dipole interactions is discussed in terms of resonant coupling examples and the collective radiative excitation eigenmodes of the system.
Superradiance has been extensively studied in the 1970s and 1980s in the regime of superfluorescence, where a large number of atoms are initially excited. Cooperative scattering in the linear-optics regime, or "single-photon superradiance," has been investigated much more recently, and superradiant decay has also been predicted, even for a spherical sample of large extent and low density, where the distance between atoms is much larger than the wavelength. Here, we demonstrate this effect experimentally by directly measuring the decay rate of the off-axis fluorescence of a large and dilute cloud of cold rubidium atoms after the sudden switch off of a low-intensity laser driving the atomic transition. We show that, at large detuning, the decay rate increases with the on-resonance optical depth. In contrast to forward scattering, the superradiant decay of off-axis fluorescence is suppressed near resonance due to attenuation and multiple-scattering effects.