Effect of superradiance on transport of diffusing photons in cold atomic gases

Abstract

We show that in atomic gases cooperative effects like superradiance and subradiance lead to a potential between two atoms that decays like $1/r$. In the case of superradiance, this potential is attractive for close enough atoms and can be interpreted as a coherent mesoscopic effect. The contribution of superradiant pairs to multiple scattering properties of a dilute gas, such as photon elastic mean free path and group velocity, is significantly different from that of independent atoms. We discuss the conditions under which these effects may be observed and compare our results to recent experiments on photon transport in cold atomic gases.

4 pages and 1 figure

Cited by in corpus (5)

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• Cooperative effects and disorder: A scaling analysis of the spectrum of the effective atomic Hamiltonian
• Breakdown of the few-level approximation in collective systems
• Subradiance in dilute atomic ensembles: Role of pairs and multiple scattering
• Superradiance and multiple scattering of photons in atomic gases