The radiation pattern emitted by two atoms, interacting with each other via the vacuum radiation field, has been calculated, including effects of magnetic state degeneracy for atoms with a ground state having G=0 angular momentum and an excited state having H=1 angular momentum. For an initial condition in which both atoms are inverted, the time-integrated radiation pattern is identical to that for non-interacting atoms if the atoms lie on the z-axis, but differs if the atoms lie on the x-axis. The underlying dynamics giving rise to this behavior are examined.
Two-atom superradiance is studied for atoms having a J=0 ground state and a J=1 excited state. The atoms lie on the x-axis and are excited by a σ_{+}-polarized laser pulse propagating in the z-direction. We use two, complementary approaches to obtain the final angular momentum in the field, a source-field approach and a Schrodinger picture approach. Both approaches give identical answers, but it is necessary to include terms in both calculations that, at first glance, might not be expected to contribute. We show that, owing to an exchange between a state in which atom 1 is in its m=1 excited state and atom 2 is in its ground state to one in which atom 2 is in its m=-1 excited state and atom 1 in its ground state, the final angular momentum in the field is not necessarily equal to the initial angular momentum in the two-atom system. The missing angular momentum appears as orbital angular momentum of the two atoms.
Using the formalism developed earlier, we treat spontaneous emission from a pair of identical two-level atoms
A1,
A2, whose separation
r21 can be comparable to the wavelength $\ensuremath{\lambda}$. We obtain expressions for time-dependent intensities and damping rates with the initial conditions (a) both atoms inverted, (b) prior excitation by a short $\frac{1}{2}\ensuremath{\pi}$ pulse, and (c) only
A1 inverted. The results in (a) are compared with those obtained for a model consisting of two initially excited harmonic oscillators
O1,
O2. The atoms exhibit superradiant behavior, whereas
O1,
O2 tend to trap radiation. In (a), the intensity pattern $\mathcal{R}(\ensuremath{\theta},t)$ develops lobes in different directions at different times, so that the spatial distribution of photons at time $t\ensuremath{\rightarrow}\ensuremath{\infty}$ is the same as in the independent-atom case ${r}_{21}\ensuremath{\gg}\ensuremath{\lambda}$. For the oscillators, the lobes of $\mathcal{R}(\ensuremath{\theta},t)$ do not change direction, but only become more pronounced as time increases. In (b) and (c), the lobes oscillate back and forth at frequency $2{\ensuremath{\Omega}}_{12}$ corresponding to the shifts $\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}{\ensuremath{\Omega}}_{12}$ of the triplet and singlet states due to the ${A}_{1}\ensuremath{-}{A}_{2}$ interaction. The intensity can therefore have a sinusoidal component. Field correlation functions calculated for (a) and (c) show that
A2 and
A2 radiate simultaneously around the frequencies $\ensuremath{\epsilon}\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}{\ensuremath{\Omega}}_{12}$, where $\ensuremath{\epsilon}$ is the single-atom resonant frequency. The spectrum is calculated for case (c), and shows the effects of coherent linewidth enhancement in addition to the frequency shifts.
We study the dynamics of a system consisting of a two-level atom and a quantum oscillator coupled by the vacuum radiation field. The oscillator and the atom are assumed to have the same resonance frequency. In contrast to the two-atom or two-oscillator case, the atom-oscillator system leads to an unclosed hierarchy of equations for the operators that determine the radiation pattern emitted by the atom-oscillator system. Instead of using the operator equations, we formulate the problem in terms of density-matrix equations which can be solved once the initial conditions are specified. As an example, we looked at the radiation pattern, the decay dynamics, and the spectrum for an initial condition in which the oscillator is in its
n=1 state and the atom is in its excited state. Dressed states (dressed by the static interaction between the atom and oscillator) prove to be especially useful for interpreting the results and comparing them with the two-atom and two-oscillator systems. All calculations are carried out using the resonance or rotating-wave approximation. The relationship of our work to damped Jaynes-Cummings models is noted.
The frequency distribution of resonant radiation emitted by a system of two identical interacting atoms is calculated. The separation between the atoms is assumed to be much larger than the size of their charge distributions. Initially one atom is excited while the second one is in the ground state. The two atoms are coupled through the radiation field and the electrostatic interaction. For not too large internuclear separations the line shape of the emitted radiation exhibits two distinct peaks, and the general features are identical with the result obtained from resonance fluorescence scattering. In the decay process, however, there is equal probability of scattering through the symmetric and antisymmetric states, and thus the peak heights of the emitted radiation are different from the ones in the resonance fluorescent case. For large internuclear separations the two peaks merge into the one characteristic of the line shape of a single isolated atom.
In order to study the cooperative emission of radiation from an extended system of
N two-level atoms, we use the master-equation approach within the Born and Markov approximations. All the properties of the emission of radiation can be deduced from the diagonalization of the coupling matrix $\ensuremath{\Gamma}$, where an element ${\ensuremath{\Gamma}}_{\mathrm{jk}}$ gives the coupling between the atoms labeled
j and
k via the electromagnetic field. We choose a pencil-shaped volume and study analytically the coupling matrix in the limit for small and large Fresnel numbers. For Fresnel numbers of order unity numerical methods are used. Thus we prove that, for the pencil-shaped geometry, any elaborated model must take into account the interaction of the atoms with the infinity of electromagnetic field modes lying inside two small solid angles about the axis of the largest linear dimension, which we label the
z axis. In other words, the intensity of radiation emitted by any atom of the system depends on its position with respect to the others and this "propagation effect" cannot be neglected when interpreting superradiance experiments. For small Fresnel numbers the
z dependence predominates, in the opposite case the (
x,y) dependence does, while for Fresnel numbers of order unity the dependence of all three components must be taken into account. Preliminary calculations are given for which only the
z dependence is considered; for Fresnel numbers of magnitude of order unity or smaller, the effect of propagation along the
z axis displays large delays for the appearance of superradiance with respect to the time at which the superradiant pulse is maximum when the "propagation effects" are neglected (one-mode model).
This paer is concerned with the spontaneous-emision rate of two two-level atoms which have different resonance frequencies and whose spatial separation is much smaller than the corresponding mean resonance wavelength. The total radiation rate of such an atom pair is calculated completely quantum mechanically as a function of time. Explicit results are given for various values of the frequeny difference and the following initial states of the atomic system: (a) both atoms in the excited state, (b) one taom in the excited state the other in the ground state, (c) a symmetric combination of those states, (d) an antisymmetric combination of those states, and product states where each atom is in an equal superposition of its ground and excited states, for which the expectation values of the dipole moments are nonzero and may be considered to be osicillating (e) in phase, (f) in opposite phae, and (g) in random phase. Oscillations are found to appear in the radiation rate in all cases when the frequency difference becomes larger than a certain critical value, viz., the mean half-width of the atomic resonance lines. The oscillations are especially pronounced for the initial atomic states (c), (d), (e), and (f), which exhibit superradiance and radiation trapping. For example, for atoms in the antisymmetric state (d), for which the radiation from two identical atoms is zero (completely self-trapped), a pair of nonidentical atoms begins radiating and even oscillates into the superradiant region at times.