Cooperative effects in the spontaneous decay of few atoms

Suc-Kyoung Hong, Seog Woo Nam, Hyung-Jin Yang

We study the spontaneous emission from a few two-level nano-emitters placed in a leaky microcavity with Lorentzian spectral density near a critically damped regime. Collective features of the spontaneous emission are investigated by numerical analysis of the excitation dynamics when initially one nano-emitter is totally excited but we do not know which one. The results show that there are three decay rates in the excitation dynamics, two for simple exponential decays and one for damped oscillatory decay. The excitation dynamics is found to critically depend on the regime of the system. It is shown that the spontaneous emission is enhanced or suppressed depending on whether the system is in the underdamped or overdamped regime, respectively. On the other hand, the cooperative spontaneous emission is suppressed in the underdamped while it is enhanced in the overdamped regime. Furthermore, the effect of the direct inter-emitter coupling on the breaking of the cooperativeness of the spontaneous emission is shown as well.

R. Bonifacio

Zhidang Chen, Helen S. Freedhoff

In this paper, we study cooperative two-photon transitions in a system of two (nonoverlapping) atoms for two processes: two-photon spontaneous emission and two-photon resonance fluorescence. Expressions are obtained for the energy shifts and decay rates due to the interaction of the atoms with and via the field. The altered decay rates signal the existence of superradiance and subradiance in the two-atom system. The energy shifts of the single-excitation states are found to be proportional to ${\mathit{R}}^{\mathrm{\ensuremath{-}}6}$ for small atomic separations R, and to ${\mathit{R}}^{\mathrm{\ensuremath{-}}2}$ for large separations.

Dmitri Smirnov, I. V. Sokolov, Evgenii Dmitrievich Trifonov

N. A. Enaki, M. A. Makovei

We study the cooperative two-photon spontaneous decay of an excited atomic system in a microcavity whose size is of the order of several wavelengths of atomic radiation. We show that a thermalized electromagnetic field in the microcavity strongly affects the two-photon cooperative spontaneous emission of radiation. The increase in the rate of spontaneous cooperative decay is due to the presence of a small number of thermalized photons in a microcavity mode. At low temperatures, the two-photon absorption probability is found to be a linear function of the two-photon flux, and photon superbunching is observed.

Zhidang Chen, Helen S. Freedhoff