Characteristics of cooperative spontaneous radiation with applications to atom microscopy and coherent XUV radiation generation

Cooperative effect in the radiation process has been studied in for more than half a century. It is important in the sense of both basic physics and applied science. In this work, we study the dynamics of the cooperative spontaneous emission from an ensemble of N atoms which is uniformly excited by absorbing a single photon. We reveal that there are two different regimes in which the system exhibits totally different behaviors. One of them is the superradiance type of behavior: the system decays much quicker than single atom decay, with a decay rate proportional to N(?/R)2, where N is the atom numbers, R is the size of the atom cloud, and ? is the wavelength. We call it Markovian regime because the sytem does not persist memory effect. The other regime is called non-Markovian regime and the system oscillates with effective Rabi oscillation frequency while slowly decaying with a rate proportional to the photon escaping rate. The effective Rabi oscillation is a new type of dynamics which analogs well known Cavity QED behavior. Particularly in the Markovian regime, we study the system dynamics as a manybody eigenfunction and eigenvalue problem. For a dense cloud, we find analytical solutions for the eigenstates and corresponding eigenvalues, which can help to generally describe the system dynamics for any initial conditions in this regime. One of the applications is in atom microscopy. We propose a scheme to measure the distance between two atoms/molecules beyond diffraction limit. It covers the whole range from half the wavelength to sub-nanometers, utilizing both the atom localization technique and the collective frequency shift effect due to the cooperative effect in the radiation of the two atoms. Another application that we propose is to generate Coherent XUV radiation using Raman-type superradaince. We prove that intense short pulses of XUV radiation can be produced by Raman type superradiance from an ensemble of atoms/ions driven by visible or IR laser pulses.