2026/01/31 by Ignacio González, Ángel Rivas · 3 voices
Computer Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Dissipation #Limit (mathematics) #Lossy compression #Monotonic function #Phase (matter) #Phase transition #Quantum Information and Cryptography #Quantum optics and atomic interactions #Scaling #Strong Light-Matter Interactions #Superradiance
paper · pdf · doi:10.22331/q-2026-07-15-2159
openalex publication_date 2026/07/15 · rss pubdate 2026/07/15 · openalex created_date 2026/07/16 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Quantum 10, 2159 (2026). https://doi.org/10.22331/q-2026-07-15-2159 We investigate the emergence of cooperative radiation phenomena in ensembles of two-level atoms coupled to a lossy resonant cavity beyond the Markovian and mean-field approximations. By deriving a complete analytical solution for the two-emitter case and employing a numerically exact method for larger ensembles, we characterize the full transition from Markovian to non-Markovian collective dynamics for systems of up to 103 emitters. Our results reveal three distinct regimes: a Markovian phase exhibiting the standard superradiant burst, a non-Markovian phase featuring spontaneous superabsorption of the emitted field, and a critical regime marked by pulsed collective emission. We show that the critical spectral width separating these behaviors increases monotonically with the number of emitters, demonstrating that environmental memory effects can be enhanced by cooperativity. Finally, we find that the superradiant scaling of the peak intensity progressively degrades with increasing system size, approaching a subquadratic law in the limit of a perfect cavity. In this regime, spontaneous superabsorption emerges as a distinct manifestation of non-Markovian cooperativity.