Abstract We develop the theory of dynamical superradiance – the collective exchange of energy between an ensemble of initially excited emitters and a single-mode cavity – for organic materials where electronic states are coupled to vibrational modes. We consider two models to capture the vibrational effects: first, vibrations treated as a Markovian bath for two-level emitters, via a pure dephasing term in the Lindblad master equation for the system; second, vibrational modes directly included in the system via the Holstein–Tavis–Cummings Hamiltonian. By exploiting the permutation symmetry of the emitters and weak U(1) symmetry, we develop a numerical method capable of exactly solving the Tavis–Cummings model with local dissipation for up to 140 emitters. Using the exact method, we validate mean-field and second-order cumulant approximations and use them to describe macroscopic numbers of emitters. We analyze the dynamics of the average cavity photon number, electronic coherence, and Bloch vector length and show that the effect of vibrational mode coupling goes beyond simple dephasing. Our results show that superradiance is possible in the presence of vibrational mode coupling; for negative cavity detunings, the vibrational coupling may even enhance superradiance. We identify asymmetry of the photon number rise time as a function of the detuning of the cavity frequency as an experimentally accessible signature of such vibrationally assisted superradiance.
Lovett et al. (Fri,) studied this question.