Hyperradiance from collective behavior of coherently driven atoms Academic Article uri icon

abstract

  • 2017 Optical Society of America. The collective behavior of ensembles of atoms has been studied in-depth since the seminal paper of Dicke [Phys. Rev. 93, 99 (1954)], where he demonstrated that a group of emitters in collective states is able to radiate with increased intensity and modified decay rates in particular directions, a phenomenon that he called superradiance. Here, we show that the fundamental setup of two atoms coupled to a single-mode cavity can distinctly exceed the free-space superradiant behavior, a phenomenon we call hyperradiance. The effect is accompanied by strong quantum fluctuations and surprisingly arises for atoms radiating out-of-phase, an alleged non-ideal condition where one expects subradiance. We are able to explain the onset of hyperradiance in a transparent way by a photon cascade taking place among manifolds of Dicke states with different photon numbers under particular out-of-phase coupling conditions. These theoretical results can be realized with current technology and should thus stimulate future experiments.

published proceedings

  • OPTICA

altmetric score

  • 0.5

author list (cited authors)

  • Pleinert, M., von Zanthier, J., & Agarwal, G. S.

citation count

  • 30

complete list of authors

  • Pleinert, Marc-Oliver||von Zanthier, Joachim||Agarwal, Girish S

publication date

  • July 2017

published in