Abstract
Macroscopic ensembles of radiating dipoles are ubiquitous in the physical and natural sciences. In the classical limit the dipoles can be described as damped-driven oscillators, which are able to spontaneously synchronize and collectively lock their phases in the presence of nonlinear coupling. Here we investigate the corresponding phenomenon with arrays of quantized two-level systems coupled via long-range and anisotropic dipolar interactions. Our calculations demonstrate that by incoherently driving dense packed arrays of strongly interacting dipoles, the dipoles can overcome the decoherence induced by quantum fluctuations and inhomogeneous coupling and reach a synchronized steady-state characterized by a macroscopic phase coherence. This steady-state bears much similarity to that observed in classical systems, and yet also exhibits genuine quantum properties such as quantum correlations and quantum phase diffusion (reminiscent of lasing). Our predictions could be relevant for the development of better atomic clocks and a variety of noise tolerant quantum devices.
Highlights
Arrays of synchronized oscillators [1] are ubiquitous in biological [2, 3], physical [4] and engineering [5] systems and are a resource for technological advances [6]
Current investigations have been limited to the exact treatment of arrays of a small number of coupled quantum oscillators [8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18], and large ensembles at the mean field level or by including quantum corrections perturbatively [19,20,21]
VI we study the emergence of quantum synchronization in radiating dipoles taking the full long-range and anisotropic dipolar interactions into account
Summary
Arrays of synchronized oscillators [1] are ubiquitous in biological [2, 3], physical [4] and engineering [5] systems and are a resource for technological advances [6]. By dense arrays of frozen dipoles we mean arrays separated by a distance much closer than the wavelength of the emitted photons and with motional degrees of freedom evolving at a much slower rate than their internal dynamics (Fig. 1) These conditions can be readily satisfied in a variety of quantum systems found in atomic, molecular and optical physics (e.g., Rydberg gases [29,30,31], alkali vapors [32], alkaline-earth atoms [33], and polar molecules [34]), chemistry (e.g., J-aggregates of dye molecules [35,36,37]), and biology (e.g., light-harvesting complexes [38, 39]).
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