Single-Pulse Superfluorescence in Cesium

Observation of picosecond superfluorescent pulses in rubidium atomic vapor pumped by 100-fs laser pulses

“…The SF temporal ringing in two-level atoms has been widely studied [7,[10][11][12][27][28][29]. However, the ringing has not been investigated in a cascade three-level system.…”

Cooperative recombination of electron-hole pairs in semiconductor quantum wells under quantizing magnetic fields

“…[8][9][10] The resultant macroscopic optical polarization decays superradiantly, 11,12 producing a highly directional burst of coherent radiation. Until very recently, SF have been observed in atomic gases 13,14 and rarefied impurities in crystals. [15][16][17] Observations of SF emission from high-density systems such as semiconductor electronhole plasmas have heretofore proven difficult.…”

Stochastic pulse switching in a degenerate resonant optical medium

“…While a fully quantum description of this interaction has also been developed [17,21], probably its most revealing description has been furnished by the semiclassical model provided by the Maxwell-Bloch system of equations [17,[22][23][24][25]. This model has helped to uncover the fundamentals of the resonant interaction between an electromagnetic field and a system of active atoms in the regime in which the field can be described classically and the medium by quantum mechanics, and in which a great number of the relevant experiments have been carried out [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15]. In fact, many physical effects observed in these experiments, from the photon echo [2] and self-induced transparency [3,4] to the chaotic laser dynamics [11], have been explained using the MaxwellBloch equations in the idealized two-level approximation, in which the light is assumed to be monochromatic and to interact resonantly with only two active atomic levels in the optical medium [17,[23][24][25][26][27][28].…”

“…Resonant interaction of light with active optical media has given rise to one of the most fruitful areas of applied physics in having provided the foundation of numerous important physical effects over the past six decades [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15], and served as one of the basic mechanisms used in laser operation and optical amplifiers [16][17][18][19][20]. While a fully quantum description of this interaction has also been developed [17,21], probably its most revealing description has been furnished by the semiclassical model provided by the Maxwell-Bloch system of equations [17,[22][23][24][25].…”

“…The McCall-Hahn phenomenon of self-induced transparency [3][4][5]-a medium whose atoms are initially in the ground state becoming transparent to optical pulses with the resonant carrier frequency-was first analyzed using complete integrability in [29], after many exact solutions hinting at possible integrability had been found in [30,31]. For superfluorescence [8][9][10]-the generation of optical pulses from the random fluctuations of the initial medium polarization in an excited mediumthe linear stage was addressed in [32], where the statistics of the delay time between the pumping of the medium and the pulse maximum were derived in terms of the statistics of the polarization fluctuations, and shown to be Gaussian. The fully nonlinear problem was subsequently addressed using its integrable structure in [33][34][35], whose main result was the shape of the superfluorescence pulse and its relation to the delay time.…”