Observation of a Cooperative Radiation Force in the Presence of Disorder
Observation of a Cooperative Radiation Force in the Presence of Disorder
Cooperative scattering of light by an extended object such as an atomic ensemble or a dielectric sphere is fundamentally different from scattering from many pointlike scatterers such as single atoms. Homogeneous distributions tend to scatter cooperatively, whereas fluctuations of the density distribution increase the disorder and suppress cooperativity. In an …