Dynamical Evolution of Correlated Spontaneous Emission of a Single Photon from a Uniformly Excited Cloud of N Atoms
Anatoly A. Svidzinsky, Juntao Chang, Marlan O. Scully · Physical Review Letters · 2008
We study the correlated spontaneous emission from a dense spherical cloud of N atoms uniformly excited by absorption of a single photon. We find that the decay of such a state depends on the relation between an effective Rabi frequency Omega proportional square root N and the time of photon flight through the cloud R/c. If OmegaR/c>1, the coupled atom-radiation system oscillates between the collective Dicke state (with no photons) and the atomic ground state (with one photon) with frequency Omega while decaying at a rate c/R.