We study effects of direct interatomic interaction on cooperative processes in atom-photon dynamics. Using a model of two-level atoms with Ising-type interaction as an example, it is demonstrated that interparticle interaction can promote cooperative radiative relaxation. For small number of atoms this results in inhibition of incoherent spontaneous decay leading to the regime of collective pulse relaxation. Above superradiance threshold increase in delay time and enhancement of superradiance is occurred. In the case of strong interaction (as compared to excitation energy of an atom) transition to the regime of multiphoton relaxation occurs, which we discuss using a simple model of two atoms in a high-Q single mode cavity. It is shown that such transition is accompanied by Rabi oscillations involving many-atom multiphoton states. Dephasing effect of dipole-dipole interaction and solitonic mechanism of relaxation are discussed as well.
We study effects of direct interatomic interaction on cooperative processes in atom-photon dynamics. Using a model of two-level atoms with Ising-type interaction as an example, it is demonstrated that interparticle interaction can promote cooperative radiative relaxation. For small number of atoms this results in inhibition of incoherent spontaneous decay leading to the regime of collective pulse relaxation. Above superradiance threshold increase in delay time and enhancement of superradiance is occurred. In the case of strong interaction (as compared to excitation energy of an atom) transition to the regime of multiphoton relaxation occurs, which we discuss using a simple model of two atoms in a high-Q single mode cavity. It is shown that such transition is accompanied by Rabi oscillations involving many-atom multiphoton states. Dephasing effect of dipole-dipole interaction and solitonic mechanism of relaxation are discussed as well.
We study effects of direct interatomic interaction on cooperative processes in atom-photon dynamics. Using a model of two-level atoms with Ising-type interaction as an example, it is demonstrated that interparticle interaction combined with atom-field coupling can introduce additional interatomic correlations acting as a phase synchronizing factor. For the case of weakly interacting atoms with $J<\ensuremath{\hbar}{\ensuremath{\omega}}_{0}$, where J is the interparticle coupling constant and ${\ensuremath{\omega}}_{0}$ is the atomic frequency, dynamical regimes of cooperative relaxation of atoms are analyzed in the Born-Markov approximation both numerically and using the mean field approximation. We show that interparticle correlations induced by the direct interaction result in inhibition of incoherent spontaneous decay leading to the regime of collective pulse relaxation which differs from superradiance in nature. For superradiant transition, the synchronizing effect of interatomic interaction is found to manifest itself in enhancement of superradiance. When the interaction is strong and $J>\ensuremath{\hbar}{\ensuremath{\omega}}_{0}$, one-particle one-photon transitions are excluded and transition to the regime of multiphoton relaxation occurs. Using a simple model of two atoms in a high-Q single mode cavity we show that such transition is accompanied by Rabi oscillations involving many-atom multiphoton states. Dephasing effects of dipole-dipole interaction and solitonic mechanism of relaxation are discussed.
We discuss the cooperative decay of initial atomic excitation for a pencil-shaped active volume filled with two-level atoms. As long as the length of the sample is much smaller than a certain maximal cooperation length, the atom-field interaction producing the superradiant pulse can be treated in terms of the simplest possible laser model (single mode). The basic laser master equation turns out to be exactly solvable if specified for the superradiance limit which is characterized by two conditions: (i) The photons escape from the low-Q cavity so fast that they cannot feed themselves back into atomic excitation to any appreciable amount (this no-feedback condition is equivalent to the above-mentioned requirement for the length of the sample). (ii) The incoherent atomic decay due to natural relaxation is so slow that the individual atomic dipoles do not dephase before engaging themselves cooperatively in the interaction with the electromagnetic field. The present paper presents the derivation and general discussion of the equations describing the statistical properties of atoms and field in a superradiant pulse. Analytical and numerical solutions will be presented in a subsequent paper.
The collective scattering of light by a large number of coupled scatterers yields a rich many-body physics, yet treating such a problem in the quantum regime is a challenge.In this thesis, we consider a large atomic cloud in free space and driven by a monochromatic light, where the vacuum modes induce long-range dipole-dipole interactions.In order to study clouds of hundreds of particles, higher order correlation terms are neglected, keeping only quantum correlations between pair of atoms: this allows to reduce the number of degrees of freedom from 2 2N in the full quantum model to N 2 .Most of the works in the literature on dipole-dipole interactions have been performed in the linear optics limit, and our techniques allow to compare classical to beyond-semi-classical results.In particular, superradiance and subradiance have been reported in the decay dynamics of the cloud.Differently, by considering a system in the ground state and switching on the pump, we show that superradiance is also present in the Rabi oscillations at a rate obtained from using a single-dipole model for the radiated intensity.A frequency shift in the Rabi oscillations is also reported, which can be interpreted, in a linear dispersion theory, as a signature of a collective multimode vacuum Rabi splitting.While the classical dipoles model captures correctly the dynamics in the low-intensity regime, it fails for higher saturation, where semi-classical methods can be applied successfully.In particular, we observe a quantum subradiant decay in the intensity of the radiated field in the saturated regime.Furthermore, considering the decay dynamics starting from an initially strongly driven cloud, we observed that the states with n < N/2 excited atoms decays much slower than the ones with n > N/2: in other words, the upper part of the Dicke ladder is characterized by a superradiant emission, and the lower part by a subradiant one.Finally, investigating the fluorescence spectrum, we obtained quantum cooperative effects that modify the steady-state spectrum: additional sidebands at twice the Rabi frequency for the system driven at resonance and, out of resonance, an asymmetry in the peaks at the generalized Rabi frequency, and for all detection angles.We also present preliminary results of a sensor model that can capture the time evolution of the spectrum in the decay dynamics, a situation that the quantum regression theorem fails to describe.Several of these results were discussed in parallel with experimental data obtained by an experimental group of collaborators, and others aim to guide future experiments.
Sub- and superradiant dynamics of spontaneously decaying atoms are manifestations of collective many-body systems. We study the internal dynamics and the radiation properties of two atoms in free space. Interesting results are obtained when the atoms are separated by less than half a wavelength of the atomic transition, where the dipole-dipole interaction gives rise to new coherent effects, such as (a) coherence between two intermediate collective states, (b) oscillations in the two-photon correlation G(2), (c) emission of two photons by one atom, and (d) the loss of directional correlation. We compare the population dynamics during the two-photon emission process with the dynamics of single-photon emission in the cases of a $\ensuremath{\Lambda}$ and a V scheme. We compute the temporal correlation and angular correlation of two successively emitted photons using the G(2) for different values of atomic separation. We find antibunching when the atomic separation is a quarter wavelength $\ensuremath{\lambda}∕4$. Oscillations in the temporal correlation provide a useful feature for measuring subwavelength atomic separation. Strong directional correlation between two emitted photons is found for atomic separation larger than a wavelength. We also compare the directionality of a photon spontaneously emitted by the two atoms prepared in phased-symmetric and phased-antisymmetric entangled states ${\ensuremath{\mid}\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}⟩}_{{\mathbf{k}}_{0}}={e}^{i{\mathbf{k}}_{0}∙{\mathbf{r}}_{1}}\ensuremath{\mid}{a}_{1},{b}_{2}⟩\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}{e}^{i{\mathbf{k}}_{0}∙{\mathbf{r}}_{2}}\ensuremath{\mid}{b}_{1},{a}_{2}⟩$ by a laser pulse with wave vector k0. Photon emission is directionally suppressed along k0 for the phased-antisymmetric state. The directionality ceases for interatomic distances less than $\ensuremath{\lambda}∕2$.
Fully-excited two-level atoms separated by less than the transition wavelength cooperatively emit light in a short burst, a phenomenon called superradiance by R. Dicke in 1954. The burst is characterized by a maximum intensity scaling with the square of the number of atoms N and a temporal width reduced by N compared to the single atom spontaneous decay time. Both effects are usually attributed to a synchronization of the electric dipole moments of the atoms occurring during the process of light emission. Contrary to this explanation, it was recently shown by use of a quantum path description that the peak intensity results from the quantum correlations among the atoms when occupying symmetric Dicke states. Here we investigate from this perspective the temporal evolution of the ensemble, starting in the small sample limit, i.e., when the atoms have mutual separations much smaller than the transition wavelength λ and pass down the ladder of symmetric Dicke states. In addition, we explore the temporal evolution for the case of non-interacting atoms with mutual separations much larger than λ. We show that in this case a similar superradiant burst of the emitted radiation is observed if the quantum correlations of the atoms are generated by conditional photon measurements retaining the atomic ensemble within or close to the symmetric subspace.
When atoms are coupled to a common electromagnetic environment, the exchange of photons through dipole-dipole interactions leads to the emergence of cooperative effects. As a particular example, superradiance arises from spontaneous emission when this exchange leads to constructive interference of the emitted photons. Here, we introduce an integrated method for studying cooperative radiation in many-body systems. This method, which allows to study extended systems with arbitrarily large number of particles, can be formulated by an effective, nonlinear, two-atom master equation that describes the dynamics using a closed form which treats single- and many-body terms on an equal footing. We apply this method to a homogeneous gas of initially inverted two-level atoms, and demonstrate the appearance of both superradiance and subradiance, identifying a many-body coherence term as the source of these cooperative effects. We describe the many-body induced broadening -- which is analytically found to scale with the optical depth of the system -- and light shifts, and distinguish spontaneous effects from induced ones. In addition, we theoretically predict the time-dependence of subradiance, and the phase change of the radiated field during the cooperative decay.