Cooperative spontaneous emission of three identical atoms

Abstract

We study cooperative single-photon spontaneous emission from three multilevel atoms with one of them being excited for different atomic configurations in optical vector theory. The dynamic evolution is solved by finding the eigenvalues of a 3 \ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{} 3 matrix, and then the relevant decay rates and Lamb shifts are obtained analytically. It is shown that the symmetry of atomic configuration has a big influence on the super-radiance of the system. To obtain strong super-radiance requires not only the distances among the three atoms to be much shorter than the wavelength, but also to have symmetrical distribution. We also calculate the emission spectra and find that it normally has three peaks, but it has two peaks under the equilateral-triangle configuration.