Spontaneous emission of atomic systems in the presence of incident fields

Abstract

We characterise the spontaneous emission time and direction from small numbers of dipole-coupled two-level atoms (2LAs) in the presence of incident fields. We show how to use adiabatic passage to admit population transfer between states in the one-quantum subspace for two and three 2LAs. Our method is a multi-atom generalisation of stimulated-Raman-adiabatic-passage (STIRAP) for a single multi-level atom. We use numerical results to justify an ansatz that enables us to give analytical expressions for the directional emission which depends on the incident fields. Our results admit a characterisation of the efficacy of population transfer in small numbers of dipole-coupled 2LAs, and are applicable to proof-of-principle experiments involving dipole-coupled 2LAs.