Patrizia Weiss

We experimentally and numerically study the subradiant decay in an ensemble of cold atoms as a function of the temperature. In the experiment we are recording the temporal switch-off dynamics of the light scattered by a cold-atom sample driven by a weak laser pulse (linear-optics regime). As subradiance is usually interpreted as an interference effect, it is not obvious that the finite temperature of the sample and for this the atomic motion don't introduce a source of dephasing with direct impact on the decay dynamics. We observe that subradiance is rather robust against an increase of the temperature, the measurements show only a slight decrease of the subradiant decay time when increasing the temperature up to several millikelvins, and in particular we measure subradiant decay rates that are much smaller than the Doppler broadening, which might be counter-intuitive. In the numerical simulations we can observe a complete breakdown of subradiance, which occurs at high temperature, when the Doppler broadening is larger than the natural decay rate of a single atom.