Abstract: This talk will present our work on the observation of super-radiance in a cloud of cold atoms driven by a laser. We start from an elongated cloud of laser cooled atoms that we excite either perpendicularly or along its main axis. This situation bears some similarities with cavity quantum electrodynamics: here the cavity mode is replaced by the diffraction mode of the elongated cloud. We observe superradiant pulses of light after population inversion. When exciting the cloud along the main axis, we observe a transition reminiscent of the one predicted by the driven Dicke model. We also measure the statistics of the emitted light by the cloud and find that it is non-Gaussian.
Host: Trey Porto