The atomic damping basis and the collective decay of interacting two-level atoms

Abstract We find analytical solutions to the evolution of interacting two-level atoms when the master equation is symmetric under the permutation of atomic labels. The master equation includes atomic independent dissipation. The method to obtain the solutions is: first, we use the system symmetries to describe the evolution in an operator space whose dimension grows polynomially with the number of atoms. Second, we expand the solutions in a basis composed of eigenvectors of the dissipative part of the master equation that models the independent dissipation of the atoms. This atomic damping basis is an atomic analog to the damping basis used for bosonic fields Briegel and Englert (1993 Phys. Rev. A 47 3311–29). The solutions show that the system decays as a sum of sub- and super-radiant exponential terms.