A new collective effect has been revealed in resonance fluorescence: the side and central components of the triplet in the emission spectrum of an atomic ensemble excited by an intense coherent field are narrowed in the case of the critical number of atoms in the ensemble.
The issue of fluorescing multiatomic ensembles is addressed in a somewhat unconventional fashion. We are concerned with the case of an ensemble being localized within a volume small compared to the wavelength. Collective phenomena in resonance fluorescence make its analytical description problematic. We employ the representation due to Holstein and Primakoff of atomic pseudo-spin operators. When the dispersion of the number of excited atoms is small, the kinetic equation turns into that for an effective quantum photonic mode. The new equation is nonlinear. Its stationary solution can easily be found nevertheless. The motion of two fluorescing ensembles is considered as well. Their interaction appears to have geometric nature.
The resonance fluorescence of a two-atom system interacting collectively with an intense driving field is studied. The first-order dispersion forces, or dipole-dipole interaction, between the atoms is included as well. The scattered-light spectrum is found to differ considerably from the single-atom spectrum even for very intense driving fields, in direct contrast with the results obtained by Agarwal et al., who studied the two-atom system but neglected the dipole-dipole interaction. The effects of collective scattering are calculated on the fluorescence spectra of idealized beams of atoms moving with uniform velocity, for a number of different number densities 〈N〉.
Statistics of photoemission events into the components of a triplet of resonance fluorescence of a two-level atom in a classical optical field, the phase of which changes by π upon the detection of spontaneous photon, is compared with the case when the feedback is absent. In contrast to the known problem on the statistics of resonance fluorescence of a two-level atom, a grouping of photocounts should be observed in each separate side component of the triplet. Anticorrelation of photoemission into side components is also predicted, and the type of correlations between the emission into the central component of the triplet and into any of the side ones can be controlled by varying the detuning of the radiation frequency from the resonant value.