Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Cardenas-Lopez, Silvia
• Masson, Stuart J
• Zager, Zoe
• Asenjo-Garcia, Ana

Titel

Many-Body Superradiance and Dynamical Mirror Symmetry Breaking in Waveguide QED

Ist Teil von

• Physical review letters, 2023-07, Vol.131 (3), p.033605-033605, Article 033605

Ort / Verlag

United States

Erscheinungsjahr

2023

Quelle

American Physical Society Journals

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• The many-body decay of extended collections of two-level systems remains an open problem. Here, we investigate whether an array of emitters coupled to a one-dimensional bath undergoes Dicke superradiance. This is a process whereby a completely inverted system becomes correlated via dissipation, leading to the release of all the energy in the form of a rapid photon burst. We derive the minimal conditions for the burst to happen as a function of the number of emitters, the chirality of the waveguide, and the single-emitter optical depth, both for ordered and disordered ensembles. Many-body superradiance occurs because the initial fluctuation that triggers the emission is amplified throughout the decay process. In one-dimensional baths, this avalanchelike behavior leads to a spontaneous mirror symmetry breaking, with large shot-to-shot fluctuations in the number of photons emitted to the left and right. Superradiant bursts may thus be a smoking gun for the generation of correlated photon states of exotic quantum statistics.