Microscopic Origin of Superradiant Biphoton Emission in Atomic Ensembles
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Quantum Physics arXiv:2602.11438 (quant-ph) [Submitted on 11 Feb 2026] Title:Microscopic Origin of Superradiant Biphoton Emission in Atomic Ensembles Authors:Zi-Yu Liu, Jiun-Shiuan Shiu, Wei-Lin Chen, Yong-Fan Chen View a PDF of the paper titled Microscopic Origin of Superradiant Biphoton Emission in Atomic Ensembles, by Zi-Yu Liu and 3 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Superradiant biphoton emission from atomic ensembles provides a powerful route to generating highly correlated quantum light, yet its microscopic physical origin has remained incompletely understood. In particular, it is often unclear how collective enhancement, spontaneous emission, and vacuum fluctuations jointly give rise to both paired biphoton generation and unavoidable unpaired background within a single, self-consistent framework. Here we present a fully quantum microscopic theory within a unified Heisenberg--Langevin--Maxwell framework that explicitly incorporates dissipation and quantum noise, thereby revealing the microscopic origin of superradiant biphoton emission in atomic ensembles. The theory provides a consistent description of parametric gain and unpaired noise within the same open-quantum-system framework and applies to both Doppler-free cold atomic ensembles and Doppler-broadened warm vapors. In the high-optical-depth regime, the coupled propagation equations admit analytical solutions, under which the biphoton dynamics rigorously reduce to an effective collective two-level emission process. Within this limit, the biphoton correlation time and spectral properties are shown to obey closed-form scaling relations governed by optical depth and excited-state decoherence. Our results establish a unified microscopic picture of superradiant biphoton generation and clarify the fundamental role of vacuum fluctuations and dissipation in setting the brightness, pairing efficiency, and temporal structure of atomic biphoton sources, with direct relevance to quantum networking and atomic quantum interfaces. Comments: Subjects: Quantum Physics (quant-ph) Cite as: arXiv:2602.11438 [quant-ph] (or arXiv:2602.11438v1 [quant-ph] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2602.11438 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration) Submission history From: Yong-Fan Chen [view email] [v1] Wed, 11 Feb 2026 23:26:08 UTC (776 KB) Full-text links: Access Paper: View a PDF of the paper titled Microscopic Origin of Superradiant Biphoton Emission in Atomic Ensembles, by Zi-Yu Liu and 3 other authorsView PDFHTML (experimental)TeX Source view license Current browse context: quant-ph new | recent | 2026-02 References & Citations INSPIRE HEP NASA ADSGoogle Scholar Semantic Scholar export BibTeX citation Loading... BibTeX formatted citation × loading... Data provided by: Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article alphaXiv Toggle alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?) Links to Code Toggle CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?) DagsHub Toggle DagsHub (What is DagsHub?) GotitPub Toggle Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?) Huggingface Toggle Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?) Links to Code Toggle Papers with Code (What is Papers with Code?) ScienceCast Toggle ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?) Demos Demos Replicate Toggle Replicate (What is Replicate?) Spaces Toggle Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?) Spaces Toggle TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?) Related Papers Recommenders and Search Tools Link to Influence Flower Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?) Core recommender toggle CORE Recommender (What is CORE?) Author Venue Institution Topic About arXivLabs arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them. Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs. Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)