Cooperative atomic emission from a line of atoms interacting with a resonant plane surface

Abstract

Cooperative effects such as super- and subradiance can be observed in the fluorescence emitted by a system of $N$ atoms in vacuum after interaction with a laser beam. In the vicinity of a dielectric or metallic surface, Casimir-Polder effects can modify collective atomic frequency shifts and decay rates. In this work, we study cooperative fluorescent emission next to resonant surfaces using the coupled-dipole model. We show that cooperative effects, expected in free space, are absent when the atoms are close to a surface whose polariton resonances coincide with the dominant atomic dipole coupling. In this case, cooperative effects are overshadowed by the very fast decay of the atomic fluorescence into surface modes. We illustrate our formalism and our results by considering a line of cesium $6D_{3/2}$ atoms in front of a sapphire surface. Finally, we propose the study of cesium $6P_{3/2}$ atoms in front of a resonant metasurface as the most promising scenario for experimentally demonstrating the results of our study.