Transitions to super-radiance in ensembles of incoherently pumped emitters

Abstract

Super-radiance is a striking phenomenon resulting from the collective interaction of emitters with light, and it is fundamentally related to the appearance of long-range correlations between the dipole moments of the emitters. As such, it represents a distinct phase of dissipative many-body systems compared to the case of independent emitters, similarly to how ferromagnetism stands out in magnetic materials in contrast to paramagnetism. In this work we address the conditions under which the transition to super-radiance can occur in ensembles of emitters subject to dephasing and individual decay -- a situation which is particularly relevant to the case of emitters in the solid state. The simplifying assumption of an ensemble of permutationally invariant emitters allows for the efficient solution of both the dissipative dynamics after a pulsed excitation, as well as of the steady state under incoherent pumping. This exact solution allows us to benchmark a truncated cumulant expansion approach, which can give predictions for arbitrarily big system sizes. We show that super-radiance is fundamentally robust to sizable dephasing and non-radiative decay rates, both under a pulsed excitation, as well as under continuous pumping. This robustness is the result of the collective acceleration effect of super-radiant emission with respect to the individual coupling to a local environment. We establish the universal critical scaling laws at the transition between normal radiance and super-radiance; and we show that, in the super-radiant phase, significant finite-size crossovers can be observed before reaching the asymptotic scaling regime. Our results pave the way for future experiments to provide a quantitative characterization of the scaling properties of super-radiance, seen as a distinct non-equilibrium many-body phase in ensembles of incoherently pumped emitters.