Dynamical Evolution of Correlated Spontaneous Emission of a Single Photon from a Uniformly Excited Cloud of<mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><mml:mi>N</mml:mi></mml:math>Atoms

Abstract

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 state exponentially decays with rate Omega(2)R/c and the state lifetime is greater than R/c. In the opposite limit 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.