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arXiv:2306.02891 · Advances in atomic, molecular, and optical physics

Super- and subradiance in dilute disordered cold atomic samples: observations and interpretations

William Guerin

Published Jan 1, 2023• 6 citations
arXivHTMLPDF
DOI
10.1016/bs.aamop.2023.04.002

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The problem of the interaction of N atoms with a laser beam and vacuum modes can give rise to many interesting phenomena concerning the spontaneous emission of light and its propagation in the medium. The cooperative effects, for example, such as superadiance and subradiance, are effects related to the coherence created between the atoms when a photon is emitted spontaneously by a single excited atom. Superradiance can be defined as the enhancement of the spontaneous emission due to constructive interference of the scattered light. Its counterpart, subradiance, is the trapping of some remaining light due to destructive interference. In cold atoms, some previous theoretical works predict and characterize these two cooperative effects in a large and diluted atomic cloud, in the regime of low intensities and large detunings of the incident laser. The theoretical model is a coupled-dipole model for two-level atoms driven by a low-intensity field and in the scalar approach. The experiment consists in measuring the super- and subradiant decay rates from the temporal emitted intensity after the switch off of the incident laser in the steady state. Our experimental setup consists in a magneto-optical trap of rubidium 87 atoms at large resonant optical thicknesses. A probe beam excites the atoms close to the D2 line. The intensity emitted is detected by a single photon detector with no afterpulsing and a calibration procedure allows us to determine the resonant optical thickness of the cloud and its temperature. In this work, we report the experimental observation of super- and subradiance in a large cloud of cold atoms. For subradiance, the main result is the linear evolution of the characteristic time with the resonant optical thickness of the cloud and its independence of the detuning. For superradiance, we observe superradiance out of the forward direction. We verify the validity of our interpretations with the predictions of the coupled-dipole model. Finally, we discuss the interplay of subradiance and radiation trapping, as well as theoretical predictions for: a setup of a phased cloud, to control the subradiant amplitude emission; and temperature effects, where subradiance is shown to be robust in a large range of temperatures.
We investigate numerically the role of near-field dipole-dipole interactions on the late-emission dynamics of large disordered cold atomic samples driven by a weak field. Previous experimental and numerical studies of subradiance in macroscopic samples have focused on low-density samples of pure two-level atoms, without internal structure, which corresponds to a scalar representation of the light. The cooperative nature of the late emission of light is then governed by the resonant optical depth. Here, by considering the vectorial nature of the light, we show the detrimental role of the near-field terms on cooperativity in higher-density samples. The observed reduction in the subradiant lifetimes is interpreted as a signature of the inhomogeneous broadening due to the near-field contributions, in analogy with the van der Waals dephasing phenomenon for superradiance.
Cooperative scattering in cold atoms has gained renewed interest, in particular in the context of single-photon superradiance, with the recent experimental observation of super- and subradiance in dilute atomic clouds. Numerical simulations to support experimental signatures of cooperative scattering are often limited by the number of dipoles which can be treated, well below the number of atoms in the experiments. In this paper, we provide systematic numerical studies aimed at matching the regime of dilute atomic clouds. We use a scalar coupled-dipole model in the low excitation limit and an exclusion volume to avoid density-related effects. Scaling laws for super- and subradiance are obtained and the limits of numerical studies are pointed out. We also illustrate the cooperative nature of light scattering by considering an incident laser field, where half of the beam has a π phase shift. The enhanced subradiance obtained under such condition provides an additional signature of the role of coherence in the detected signal.