Superradiance Near the Small-Sample Regime.

M. Araujo, Ivor Krešić, Robin Kaiser +1 more

Superradiance has been extensively studied in the 1970s and 1980s in the regime of superfluorescence, where a large number of atoms are initially excited. Cooperative scattering in the linear-optics regime, or "single-photon superradiance," has been investigated much more recently, and superradiant decay has also been predicted, even for a spherical sample of large extent and low density, where the distance between atoms is much larger than the wavelength. Here, we demonstrate this effect experimentally by directly measuring the decay rate of the off-axis fluorescence of a large and dilute cloud of cold rubidium atoms after the sudden switch off of a low-intensity laser driving the atomic transition. We show that, at large detuning, the decay rate increases with the on-resonance optical depth. In contrast to forward scattering, the superradiant decay of off-axis fluorescence is suppressed near resonance due to attenuation and multiple-scattering effects.

Robert D. Mawhinney

R.J. Cook, Peter W. Milonni

It is shown by means of a semiclassical theory that the ground state of a localized collection of two-level atoms is unstable when the atomic sample is sufficiently close to a phase-conjugating mirror with high gain. Any small disturbance causes the atoms to become excited and begin fluorescing, the fluorescence taking the form of a sequence of superradiant pulses. Experiments to test this prediction seem possible.>

L. I. Men’shikov

Yu Chen, Zhenhua Yu, Hui Zhai

In this Letter we consider spinless Fermi gases placed inside a cavity and study the critical strength of a pumping field for driving a superradiance transition. We emphasize that the Fermi surface nesting effect can strongly enhance the superradiance tendency. Around certain fillings, when the Fermi surface is nearly nested with a relevant nesting momentum, the susceptibility of the system toward a checkboard density-wave ordered state is greatly enhanced in comparison with a Bose gas with the same density, because of which a much smaller (sometime even vanishingly small) critical pumping field strength can give rise to superradiance. This effect leads to interesting reentrance behavior and a topologically distinct structure in the phase diagram. Away from these fillings, the Pauli exclusion principle brings about the dominant effect for which the critical pumping strength is lowered in the low-density regime and increased in the high-density regime. These results open the prospect of studying the rich phenomena of degenerate Fermi gases in a cavity.

Masuo Suzuki