Superradiance and subradiance in inverted atomic arrays

TL;DR

This paper investigates superradiance and subradiance phenomena in inverted atomic arrays using a mean-field approach, revealing critical lattice spacing effects, superradiant scaling, and a subradiant phase in the system's late-time dynamics.

Contribution

It introduces a mean-field method to analyze many-body atomic arrays, capturing correlations up to second order and exploring their superradiant and subradiant behaviors.

Findings

Superradiance occurs below a critical lattice spacing.

Superradiant peak scales with array parameters.

A subradiant phase appears before relaxation.

Abstract

Superradiance and subradiance are collective effects that emerge from coherent interactions between quantum emitters. Due to their many-body nature, theoretical studies of extended samples with length larger than the atomic transition wavelength are usually restricted to their early time behavior or to the few-excitation limit. We use herein a mean-field approach to reduce the complex many-body system to an effective two-atom master equation that includes all correlations up to second order and that can be numerically propagated in time. We find that three-dimensional and two-dimensional inverted atomic arrays sustain superradiance below a critical lattice spacing and quantify the scaling of the superradiant peak for both dimensionalities. Finally, we study the late-time dynamics of the system and demonstrate that a subradiant phase appears before the system finally relaxes.