Mean-Field Description of Cooperative Scattering by Atomic Clouds

TL;DR

This paper develops an analytical mean-field model to describe how light scatters from extended atomic clouds, capturing the initial, steady-state, and decay phases of excitation, but not subradiant effects.

Contribution

It provides explicit formulas for light scattering in atomic clouds and highlights the limitations of mean-field models in describing subradiance.

Findings

Mean-field model captures initial and steady-state scattering.

Model does not account for subradiant scattering.

Analytic solutions for atomic cloud excitation dynamics.

Abstract

We present analytic expressions for the scattering of light by an extended atomic cloud. We obtain the solution for the mean-field excitation of different atomic spherical distributions driven by an uniform laser, including the initial build-up, the steady-state and the decay after the laser is switched off. We show that the mean-field model does not describe subradiant scattering, due to negative interference of the photons scattered by $N$ discrete atoms.