Diego Barberena

When a large number of laser-excited atoms is packed in a small volume, all the atoms collectively emit light at an enhanced rate via a phenomenon known as Dicke superradiance. Moreover, as the laser driving strength is tuned from weak to strong, the system undergoes a superradiant phase transition. However, confining atoms to a small enough volume to observe collective effects has proven experimentally challenging.

We study the combined effects of measurements and unitary evolution on the preparation of spin squeezing in an ensemble of atoms interacting with a single electromagnetic field mode inside a cavity. We derive simple criteria that determine the conditions at which measurement based entanglement generation overperforms unitary protocols.

We utilize multilevel atoms trapped in a driven resonant optical cavity to produce scalable multimode squeezed states for quantum sensing and metrology. While superradiance or collective dissipative emission by itself has been typically a detrimental effect for entanglement generation in optical cavities, in the presence of additional drives it can also be used as an entanglement resource. In a recent work [B. Sundar, D. Barberena, A. M. Rey, and A. Piñeiro Orioli, companion paper, Phys. Rev. Lett.