Eur. Phys. J. D (2012) 66: 93
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjd/e2012-30044-2

Regular Article

Novel collective effects in integrated photonics

¹ Centre for Engineered Quantum Systems, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Macquarie University, Sydney, 2109 NSW, Australia
² CSIRO Materials Science and Engineering, P.O. Box 218, Lindfield, NSW 2070, Australia
³ Centre for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology, Department of Quantum Science, Australian National University, Canberra, 0200 ACT, Australia

^a e-mail: michael.delanty@mq.edu.au

Received: 17 January 2012
Received in final form: 23 February 2012
Published online: 19 April 2012

Abstract

Superradiance, the enhanced collective emission of energy from a coherent ensemble of quantum systems, has been typically studied in atomic ensembles. In this work we study theoretically the enhanced emission of energy from coherent ensembles of harmonic oscillators. We show that it should be possible to observe harmonic oscillator superradiance for the first time in waveguide arrays in integrated photonics. Furthermore, we describe how pairwise correlations within the ensemble can be measured with this architecture. These pairwise correlations are an integral part of the phenomenon of superradiance and have never been observed in experiments to date.