Collective effects in the radiation pressure force

Abstract

We discuss the role of diffuse, Mie and cooperative scattering on the radiation pressure force acting on the center of mass of a cloud of cold atoms. Even though a mean-field Ansatz (the `timed Dicke state'), previously derived from a cooperative scattering approach, has been shown to agree satisfactorily with experiments, diffuse scattering also describes very well most features of the radiation pressure force on large atomic clouds. We compare in detail an incoherent, random walk model for photons and a diffraction approach to the more complete description based on coherently coupled dipoles. We show that a cooperative scattering approach, although it provides a quite complete description of the scattering process, is not necessary to explain the previous experiments on the radiation pressure force.

References in corpus (6)

• Cooperative effects and disorder: A scaling analysis of the spectrum of the effective atomic Hamiltonian
• Observation of a Cooperative Radiation Force in the Presence of Disorder
• Photon bubbles in ultra-cold matter
• Single-Photon Superradiance in Cold Atoms
• Light transport in cold atoms and thermal decoherence
• Behavior of a very large magneto-optical trap

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Comparison of three approaches to light scattering by dilute cold atomic ensembles
• Mean-Field Description of Cooperative Scattering by Atomic Clouds