2022/11/01 by Wai‐Keong Mok, Ana Asenjo-Garcı́a, Mok, Wai-Keong +5 · 4 citations
Computer Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Atomic Physics (physics.atom-ph) #Cold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein Condensates #FOS: Physical sciences #Optics (physics.optics) #Quantum Information and Cryptography #Quantum Physics (quant-ph) #Strong Light-Matter Interactions
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2211.00668
openalex publication_date 2022/11/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Photon-mediated interactions within an excited ensemble of emitters can result in Dicke superradiance, where the emission rate is greatly enhanced, manifesting as a high-intensity burst at short times. The superradiant burst is most commonly observed in systems with long-range interactions between the emitters, although the minimal interaction range remains unknown. Here, we put forward a new theoretical method to bound the maximum emission rate by upper bounding the spectral radius of an auxiliary Hamiltonian. We harness this tool to prove that for an arbitrary ordered array with only nearest-neighbor interactions in all dimensions, a superradiant burst is not physically observable. We show that Dicke superradiance requires minimally the inclusion of next-nearest-neighbor interactions. For exponentially decaying interactions, the critical coupling is found to be asymptotically independent of the number of emitters in all dimensions, thereby defining the threshold interaction range where the collective enhancement balances out the decoherence effects. Our findings provide key physical insights to the understanding of collective decay in many-body quantum systems, and the designing of superradiant emission in physical systems for applications such as energy harvesting and quantum sensing.