Collective radiance in quantum degenerate systems is shaped by the interplay of spatial confinement and exchange statistics. We investigate this interplay using a purely dissipative field theoretic quartic Lindblad master equation, which captures the nonlinear dynamics of the combined motional and electronic manifolds. Our framework maps the crossover between the permutational symmetry of the trap and the exchange symmetry of the particles, quantifying how bosonic enhancement and Pauli blocking dictate superradiant and subradiant scaling. We identify two distinct routes to distinguishable dynamics: thermal dilution of the initial state at high temperatures and the dynamical breakdown of collective order via recoil induced transport in soft traps. This analysis provides a benchmark for collective emission in quantum-degenerate atomic systems with coupled motional and internal dynamics, such as optical lattice clocks and spinor gases, when dissipation is engineered to control recoil and motional heating.
Collective radiance in quantum degenerate systems is shaped by the interplay of spatial confinement and exchange statistics. We investigate this interplay using a purely dissipative field theoretic quartic Lindblad master equation, which captures the nonlinear dynamics of the combined motional and electronic manifolds. Our framework maps the crossover between the permutational symmetry of the trap and the exchange symmetry of the particles, quantifying how bosonic enhancement and Pauli blocking dictate superradiant and subradiant scaling. We identify two distinct routes to distinguishable dynamics: thermal dilution of the initial state at high temperatures and the dynamical breakdown of collective order via recoil induced transport in soft traps. This analysis provides a benchmark for collective emission in quantum-degenerate atomic systems with coupled motional and internal dynamics, such as optical lattice clocks and spinor gases, when dissipation is engineered to control recoil and motional heating.
In inverted atomic ensembles, photon-mediated interactions give rise to Dicke superradiance, a form of many-body decay that results in a rapid release of energy as a photon burst. While originally studied in pointlike ensembles, this phenomenon persists in extended ordered systems if the interparticle distance is below a certain bound. Here, we investigate Dicke superradiance in a realistic experimental setting using ordered arrays of alkaline-earth(-like) atoms, such as strontium and ytterbium. Such atoms offer exciting new opportunities for light-matter interactions, as their internal structure allows for trapping at short interatomic distances compared to their long-wavelength transitions, providing the potential for collectively enhanced dissipative interactions. Despite their intricate electronic structure, we show that two-dimensional arrays of these atomic species should exhibit many-body superradiance for achievable lattice constants. Moreover, superradiance effectively “closes” transitions, such that multilevel atoms become more two-level like. This occurs because the avalanchelike decay funnels the emission of most photons into the dominant transition, overcoming the single-atom decay ratios dictated by their fine structure and Zeeman branching. Our work represents an important step in harnessing alkaline-earth atoms as quantum optical sources and as platforms to explore many-body dissipative dynamics. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
When quantum emitters couple indistinguishably to light, they can synchronize into a collective light matter system with radiative properties profoundly different from those of independent particles. To date, the resulting collective effects have largely been confined to point like or homogeneous ensembles. Here, we open access to a qualitatively new collective regime by realizing geometrically ordered, spatially extended atom arrays with subwavelength spacing. This establishes a fundamentally new platform in which collective emission is no longer confined to a single Dicke mode but instead emerges from an ordered network of photon mediated interactions. We find that 2D atom arrays undergo strong super and subradiant emission. Despite subwavelength spacing, we achieve site resolved imaging and directly observe the buildup of spatial correlations, demonstrating the transformation of cooperative decay into a strongly correlated many-body process. We observe extensive scaling of superradiance, uncover superradiant revivals, and reveal the ferromagnetic nature of superradiance and the antiferromagnetic nature of subradiance. Our results realize a novel programmable platform for exploring and utilizing dissipative many-body quantum physics, opening new possibilities for photon capture, storage, and atom photon entanglement.
We study a bosonic analog of the paradigmatic Dicke model of superradiance, comprising interacting bosonic modes subject to fully symmetric collective decay. Depending on the interaction strength, we uncover qualitatively distinct regimes of emission. For strong interactions, the emission closely resembles Dicke superradiance, with perturbative corrections arising from the presence of additional levels. For weaker interactions, the bosonic statistics qualitatively changes the dynamics, leading to a crossover to subradiant emission. Remarkably, we show that the dynamics in this regime can be described by rate equations analogous to those of the Dicke model despite the large accessible bosonic Hilbert space. Our findings are based on a combination of analytical arguments and large-scale numerics enabled by the permutational symmetry of the problem and may be probed in circuit QED experiments.
The interaction between light and matter has captivated physicists for centuries, from early studies of vision and refraction in ancient Greece to the development of quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics in the past century. While the response of a single quantum emitter to light is well understood, the radiative properties of an ensemble of closely spaced emitters are far more intricate. Coupling to a shared electromagnetic environment induces coherent and dissipative interactions between emitters, giving rise to a collective response that cannot be captured by treating them independently. In the regime of few excitations, the system hosts delocalized subradiant states, that is, coherent superpositions that are largely decoupled from the electromagnetic field and thus decay at suppressed rates. While this weak coupling makes subradiant states attractive for quantum technologies, it also renders them difficult to manipulate. At higher excitation densities, the intrinsic nonlinearity of emitters and the exponential growth of the Hilbert space make theoretical and numerical descriptions of the system and its dynamics increasingly challenging. This thesis explores two fundamental questions: How can subradiant and dark states be selectively accessed and harnessed for practical applications in quantum technologies? And how can interacting ensembles of quantum emitters be efficiently simulated to uncover their many-body physics? The first part of the thesis develops protocols for controlling and addressing dark states in free-space and waveguide-coupled atomic arrays, demonstrating their utility in quantum storage and the deterministic generation of entangled photonic states. Incorporating atomic motion, we further show that collective subradiant states can enhance cooling in dense atomic arrays, offering new avenues for controlling motional dynamics. In the second part, we introduce cumulant expansions of the equations of motion as a powerful tool to analytically and numerically investigate collective decay in the many-body regime. We first examine the collective decay of fully excited atomic arrays in free space, characterizing the onset and scaling of the superradiant burst across different geometries. In collaboration with experiments on ultracold erbium atoms in optical lattices, we provide the first direct observations of many-body collective effects in free-space ordered arrays, including early-time superradiant bursts, late-time subradiant tails, and the emergence of atomic correlations throughout the dynamics. Finally, we theoretically and numerically explore the transient formation of multi-excitation subradiant states, and demonstrate how the existence of multiple dissipation channels suppresses steady-state superradiance in extended arrays.
Superradiance and subradiance are collective effects that emerge from coherent interactions between quantum emitters. Due to their many-body nature, theoretical studies of extended samples with length larger than the atomic transition wavelength are usually restricted to their early-time behavior or to the few-excitation limit. We use herein a mean-field approach to reduce the complex many-body system to an effective two-atom master equation that includes all correlations up to second order and that can be numerically propagated in time. We find that three-dimensional and two-dimensional inverted atomic arrays sustain superradiance below a critical lattice spacing and quantify the scaling of the superradiant peak for both dimensionalities. Finally, we study the late-time dynamics of the system and demonstrate that a subradiant phase appears before the system finally relaxes.
This thesis investigates two largely independent topics in many-body and quantum optical physics. The first concerns the thermalization of classical one-dimensional (1D) gases through three-body collisions, while the second explores collective light–matter interactions in atomic arrays and waveguide quantum electrodynamics, with an emphasis on subradiance, superradiance, and computational methods for many-body dynamics. The first part studies thermalization in dilute classical 1D gases, where conventional twobody collisions cannot establish thermal equilibrium. Using Monte Carlo calculations of the three-body collision kernel together with the Boltzmann equation and molecular dynamics simulations, we characterize the thermalization dynamics for particles interacting through inverse power-law and Lennard–Jones potentials. We show that the Boltzmann and molecular dynamics approaches agree in the dilute limit and derive the thermalization rate for inverse power-law interactions.The second part investigates realistic effects in collective light–matter systems. We first study the influence of finite trapping potentials on subradiant states in atomic arrays coupled through free space or a one-dimensional waveguide. We show that atomic motion fundamentally limits subradiant lifetimes through wavefunction delocalization, recoil heating, and dipole-force-induced motion, leading to decoherence and reduced quantum memory fidelity. These results identify optimal trapping and array configurations for long-lived collective excitations.The final chapters develop theoretical methods for describing photon emission in chiral and symmetric waveguide QED systems. Using higher-order mean-field approximations, we model collective emission in experimentally relevant chiral waveguides, obtaining agreement with recent experiments and deriving analytical expressions for photon statistics. We demonstrate that fourth-order correlations are required to capture the emergence of second-order coherence from a fully inverted state. Finally, in the thermodynamic limit of large atom number and fixed optical depth, we show that a second-order mean-field theory becomes exact, yielding analytical solutions for photon emission statistics in both chiral and symmetric waveguides. We characterize the crossover between enhanced superradiant and subradiant emission, establish the suppression of emission fluctuations in the large-system limit, and clarify the role of finite-size effects in generating nontrivial photon correlations.