Collective Lamb Shift and Modified Linewidth of An Interacting Atomic Gas

Abstract

Finding a comprehensive and general description of the collective Lamb shift and cooperative broadening in a radiatively interacting system is a long-standing open question. Both energy levels and linewidth of individual atoms are modified by the exchange of real and virtual photons making up the dipole-dipole interaction. We introduce a method to theoretically study weakly-driven, low-excited ensembles of two-level atoms, and obtain an analytic description of the collective Lamb shift and linewidth via a self-consistent formalism including infinite order of correlations which stem from only two-body interactions. We predict the dependency of these quantities, as measurables, on system parameters: the number density of the ensemble, the detuning of an external probe field, and the geometry of the sample.