Cooperative photon emission rates in random atomic clouds

Abstract

We investigate the properties of the cooperative decay modes of a cold atomic cloud, characterized by a Gaussian distribution in three dimensions, initially excited by a laser in the linear regime. We study the properties of the decay rate matrix $S$, whose dimension coincides with the number of atoms in the cloud, in order to get a deeper insight into properties of cooperative photon emission. Since the atomic positions are random, $S$ is a Euclidean random matrix whose entries are function of the atom distances. We show that, in the limit of a large number of atoms in the cloud, the eigenvalue distribution of $S$ depends on a single parameter $b_0$, called the cooperativeness parameter, which can be viewed as a quantifier of the number of atoms that are coherently involved in an emission process. For very small values of $b_0$, we find that the limit eigenvalue density is approximately triangular. We also study the nearest-neighbour spacing distribution and the eigenvector statistics, finding that, although the decay rate matrices are Euclidean, the bulk of their spectra mostly behaves according to the expectations of classical random matrix theory. In particular, in the bulk there is level repulsion and the eigenvectors are delocalized, therefore exhibiting the universal behaviour of chaotic quantum systems.