This thesis studies superradiance and subradiance in the normal modes of excitation of systems of resonant nuclei. The nuclei are treated as classical electric dipole oscillators interacting through their radiation fields. This coupling radically alters the radiative decay of the system relative to the decay of an isolated nucleus, and leads to both superradiant and subradiant states with strongly enhanced or suppressed radiative decay rates, and with normal mode frequencies which can be strongly shifted from the natural resonance frequency. This issue is of considerable current interest because it is now possible to create spatially coherent single exciton nuclear states by illuminating crystals containing resonant Mossbauer nuclei with synchrotron radiation pulses. The purpose of this thesis is to solve for the radiative eigenmodes in a system of nuclei and to investigate superradiance and subradiance both in the eigenmode solutions and in the synchrotron radiation produced nuclear exciton state.
This thesis studies superradiance and subradiance in the normal modes of excitation of systems of resonant nuclei. The nuclei are treated as classical electric dipole oscillators interacting through their radiation fields. This coupling radically alters the radiative decay of the system relative to the decay of an isolated nucleus, and leads to both superradiant and subradiant states with strongly enhanced or suppressed radiative decay rates, and with normal mode frequencies which can be strongly shifted from the natural resonance frequency. This issue is of considerable current interest because it is now possible to create spatially coherent single exciton nuclear states by illuminating crystals containing resonant Mossbauer nuclei with synchrotron radiation pulses. The purpose of this thesis is to solve for the radiative eigenmodes in a system of nuclei and to investigate superradiance and subradiance both in the eigenmode solutions and in the synchrotron radiation produced nuclear exciton state.
The exponentially decaying semi-stationary states of an assembly of identical classical radiators can have decay rates and resonant frequencies significantly different from that of an isolated radiator. These coherent effects on classical radiators emitting classical waves apply also to the particle processes in quantum limits, leading to the superradiant and subradiant modes with widths(decay rates) greatly enhanced or suppressed and resonant energies significantly shifted. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate these coherent effects on slow neutron-heavy nuclei interaction. A simple field model is introduced to show the coherent effects on the decay rates and resonant energies of two identical decaying states and on the neutron widths and resonant energies of neutron-two nuclei scattering. The latter case is also obtained by multiple scattering theory and is extended to a more general case of neutron-N nuclei scattering. The coherent effects on neutron width near Bragg angle in a crystal are also investigated.
Synchrotron pulses will excite low lying nuclear levels, and in crystals, will create nuclear exciton states which are spatially coherent superpositions of the various excited state hyperfine levels of all the nuclei in the crystal. The subsequent radiative decay is radically affected by coherence, exhibiting both a speed-up due to "coherent enhancement", and a quantum beat modulation of the decay rate which gives a periodic speed-up/slow-down of the rate for photon decay into the coherent channels. For a nuclear exciton in an antiferromagnet, the quantum beat modulation will result in an interesting "temporal pendulösung" effect.
The electromagnetic transitions of Mössbauer nuclei provide ideal two-level systems to study the cooperative effects of X-rays with matter. Recently, we have observed the collective Lamb shift (CLS) in nuclear γ-ray superradiance [Röhlsberger, R.; Schlage, K.; Sahoo, B.; Couet, S.; Rüffer, R. Science 2010, 328, 1248–1251]. An ensemble of resonant 57Fe nuclei was embedded in the center of a planar cavity and was collectively excited by synchrotron radiation into a purely superradiant state. The decay of the superradiant state can be almost two orders of magnitude faster than the single-atom nuclear decay and can be accompanied by a CLS of more than 10 times the natural linewidth. Here we review the basic features of cooperative effects that occur in nuclear γ-ray superradiance in comparison with similar effects observed in the optical regime of the electromagnetic spectrum. We show that nuclear resonant scattering of synchrotron radiation opens new ways for systematic studies of cooperative effects in the interaction of X-rays with matter.
The objective of this thesis is to expand our understanding of collective light-scattering phenomena, which manifest themselves in the strong suppression of radiation from the scattering medium. In particular, we are interested in subradiance, a collective effect in spontaneous emission which, as a result of the dissipative coupling of atoms through common electromagnetic modes, creates long-lived excitation modes in an ensemble of cold atoms, with lifetimes much longer than those of individual, isolated atoms. Previously, subradiance had been well-characterized for dilute cold-atom scattering media and the low-intensity limit of the driving laser (linear-optics regime). In this thesis, we study this collective phenomenon beyond the linear-optics and dilute regimes.To study experimentally subradiance beyond the linear-optics regime, we varied the saturation parameter of the excitation laser up to relatively large values and we have observed the increase of the subradiant population with increasing saturation parameter. More importantly, we have identified the super-linear scaling of the subradiant population beyond the linear-optics regime, due to a process similar to optical pumping via multi-excitation superradiant states. This study showed that the increase in the intensity of the driving laser beyond the linear-optics regime can overcome the weak coupling of subradiant modes with the external world.Moreover, we have numerically studied subradiance using the vectorial coupled-dipole model, with a focus on understanding the effect of the near-field dipole-dipole interaction. For that, we extensively compared the vectorial and scalar (which does not contain near-field interaction terms) models and studied the subradiant lifetime as a function of the density and optical thickness of the cold-atom cloud. We observed that the near-field terms are detrimental for subradiance, which was seen in the reduction of the subradiant lifetimes with increasing density. This detrimental character of near-field terms can be interpreted as being due to an effective inhomogeneous broadening induced by the near-field interaction, which reduces the subradiant lifetimes as the density increases.The detrimental character of near-field interaction has also been previously numerically identified for Anderson localization of light waves (Anderson localization is a coherent multiple-scattering wave phenomenon in a strongly scattering medium that results in a cessation of a diffusive wave transport; it also yields long-lived modes): the scalar coupled-dipole model predicts Anderson localization of light waves, but not the vectorial one. However, adding a strong magnetic field allows one to recover localized modes for vectorial light. In this context, we numerically studied a possible signature of Anderson localization of light in cold atoms, based on the measurement of intensity fluctuations of the scattered light. We have shown that at the transition to the localized regime, the fluctuations are enhanced. In particular, for vectorial light, we have demonstrated the absence and recovery of enhanced intensity fluctuations without and with the applied magnetic field, which further corroborates that the intensity fluctuations could serve as an experimental way to probe the localized states.
Superradiance, the cooperative spontaneous emission of photons from an ensemble of identical atoms, provides valuable insights into the many-body physics of photons and atoms. We show that an ensemble of resonant atoms embedded in the center of a planar cavity can be collectively excited by synchrotron radiation into a purely superradiant state. The collective coupling of the atoms via the radiation field leads to a substantial radiative shift of the transition energy, the collective Lamb shift. We simultaneously measured the temporal evolution of the superradiant decay and the collective Lamb shift of resonant 57Fe nuclei excited with 14.4-kilo-electron volt synchrotron radiation. Our experimental technique provides a simple method for spectroscopic analysis of the superradiant emission.
This thesis is dedicated to the study of collective effects of nuclei in single xray photon superradiance. To this end we investigate aspects of superradiance in both nuclear forward scattering and in thin-film cavities with an embedded 57Fe nuclear layer. A general theoretical framework is developed to investigate a single-photon cooperative emission from a cloud of resonant systems, atoms or nuclei, in the presence of magnetic hyperfine splitting. In the limit of a thick sample, we present our results for two means to coherently control the collective single x-ray photon emission in nuclear forward scattering. In the limit of a thin sample in a thin-film cavity with embedded resonant nuclei, we find out that unlike the magnetic hyperfine splitting of a single atom or nucleus, interesting collective effects may occur which modify the hyperfine level structure. In addition, for a certain parameter regime a spectrum reminiscent of electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) can be achieved. Based on this EIT-like effect, a theoretical control mechanism for stopping x-ray pulses in the thin-film x-ray cavity is put forward. Finally, we show theoretically that for the case of two nuclear ensembles in the thin-film cavity, pseudo-Rabi splitting due to the strong coupling between the two layers should occur. The latter findings are confirmed by preliminary experimental data.