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Quantum-discord-triggered superradiance and subradiance in a system of two separated atoms

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Abstract

We investigate collective radiant properties of two separated atoms in X-type quantum states. We show that quantum correlations measured by quantum discord (QD) can trigger and enhance superradiance and subradiance in the two-atom system even though in the absence of interatomic quantum entanglement. We also explore quantum statistical properties of photons in the superradiance and subradiance by addressing the second-order correlation function. In particular, when the initial state of the two separated atoms is the Werner state with nonzero QD, we find that radiation photons in the superradiant region exhibit the nonclassical sub-Poissonian statistics and the degree of the sub-Poissonian statistics increases with increasing of the QD amount, while radiation photons in the subradiant region have either the sub-Poissonian or super-Poissonian statistics depending on the amount of QD and the directional angle. In the subradiant regime, we predict the QD-triggered photon statistics transition from the super-Poissonian to sub-Poissonian statistics. These results shed a new light on applications of QD as a quantum resource.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the 973 Program (Grant No. 2013CB921804), the NSFC (Grant Nos. 11375060, 11075050, and 11004050), the CPSFFP (Grant No. 2013T60769), and the HPNSF (Grant No. 11JJ7001). S. Q. Tang thanks Dr. Jie-Qiao Liao for useful discussions.

Conflict of interest

The authors declared that they have no conflict of interest to this work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Low-Dimensional Quantum Structures and Quantum Control of Ministry of Education, Department of Physics, Hunan Normal University, Changsha, 410081, China

    Shi-Qing Tang, Ji-Bing Yuan, Le-Man Kuang & Xin-Wen Wang

  2. Department of Physics and Electronic Information Science, Hengyang Normal University, Hengyang, 421002, China

    Xin-Wen Wang

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  1. Shi-Qing Tang
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  2. Ji-Bing Yuan
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Correspondence to Le-Man Kuang.

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Tang, SQ., Yuan, JB., Kuang, LM. et al. Quantum-discord-triggered superradiance and subradiance in a system of two separated atoms. Quantum Inf Process 14, 2883–2894 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11128-015-1026-9

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