Spatial Coherence of Light in Collective Spontaneous Emission

Abstract

When a quantum system is put into an excited state, it will decay back to the ground state through a process termed spontaneous emission. It is generally assumed that spontaneous emission between different individual emitters would not be coherent with each other; to produce coherent light one would need population inversion and stimulated emission. In this work, we show that an optically-thin ensemble of 11,000 radiating atoms spontaneously organize to produce spatially coherent light. The reason for this coherence is collective-coupling of the individual emitters via Dicke superradiance and subradiance (as opposed to amplification through stimulated emission).

arXiv comment12 pages, 11 figures

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Cited by in corpus (8)

• A non-equilibrium superradiant phase transition in free space
• Steady-state subradiance manipulated by the two-atom decay
• Symmetry based efficient simulation of dissipative quantum many-body dynamics in subwavelength quantum emitter arrays
• Selective collective emission from a dense atomic ensemble coupled to a nanophotonic resonator
• A numerical study of the spatial coherence of light in collective spontaneous emission
• Revisiting self-seeding mechanism by generating vector ultraviolet N${}_2^{+}$ lasing
• Nonequilibrium steady state in a large magneto-optical trap
• Experimental observation of subabsorption