Phase Transition in a Radiation-Matter Interaction with Recoil and Collisions
- 14 May 2001
- journal article
- Published by American Physical Society (APS) in Physical Review Letters
- Vol. 86 (20) , 4520-4523
- https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevlett.86.4520
Abstract
The standard model introduced to describe the collective atomic recoil of an ensemble of atoms interacting with a strong electromagnetic field has been here extended by the inclusion of collisions with a buffer gas. As a result, we find that in the thermodynamic limit the coherent emission of radiation exhibits a continuous phase transition upon increasing the pump intensity. The output laser field is strictly larger than 0 only above a critical value. We find that the transition is not associated with the onset of spatial ordering but rather with the onset of a synchronization between the polarization phase and spatial position. A coherence parameter is introduced to characterize the phase transition.Keywords
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