Collective radiative effects in a two-level system

Till Vorrath

Pavel A Apanasevich, G. I. Zhovna, A. P. Khapalyuk

Xiangjin Kong, Adriana Pálffy

In an ensemble of identical atoms, cooperative effects like sub- and superradiance may alter the decay rates and the energies of specific transitions may be shifted from the single-atom value by the so-called collective Lamb shift. While such effects in ensembles of two-level systems are by now well understood, realistic multilevel systems are more difficult to handle. In this work we show that in a system of atoms under the action of an external magnetic field, the collective contribution to the level shifts can amount to sizable quantitative and qualitative deviations from the single-atom Zeeman splitting picture. We develop a formalism to describe single-photon superradiance in multilevel systems and identify three-parameter regimes, two of which present measurable deviations in the radiation spectrum compared to the case of single-atom magnetic-field-induced splitting.

Tracy Tsai

John L. Carlsten, Michael G. Raymer

N. A. Enaki

The collective decay effects between the dipole-active three-level subsystems in the nonlinear interaction with dipole-forbidden transitions, like 2 S − 1 S of hydrogen-like radiators, are proposed, taking into consideration the cooperative exchanges between two species of atoms through the vacuum field in the scattering and the two-photon resonance processes. One of them corresponds to the situation when the total energy of the emitted two photons by the three-level radiator in the cascade configuration enters into the two-photon resonance with another type of dipole-forbidden transitions of hydrogen-like (or helium-like) atoms. The similar situation appears in the cooperative scattering between two species of quantum emitters when the difference of the excited energies of the two dipole-active transitions of the three-level radiators is in the resonance with the dipole-forbidden transitions of the Hydrogen-like radiators. These effects are accompanied by the interference between single- and two-quantum collective transitions of the inverted radiators from the ensemble. The two-particle collective decay rate is defined in the description of the atomic correlation functions taking into consideration the phase retardation between them. The kinetic equations which describe the cooperative processes as the function of time and correlation are obtained. The behavior of the system of radiators at short and long time intervals in comparison with the retardation time between them is studied.