Abstract

A superradiant laser was described in [1] as a collection of N identical three-level atoms in a cavity driven by a coherent pump on one transition, 0 ↔ 2, and coupled to two resonant modes of the cavity on the other two transitions, 2↔ 1 and 1 ↔ 0 (see Fig. 1). For one of these modes, to be called the active one, the resonator should have a high finesse; the second, passive mode may be strongly damped. As long as we neglect spontaneous emission and other incoherent processes, the dynamics of such a laser is fully collective, such that the atoms can be described in terms of global observables

© 1996 Optical Society of America