Collective Cooling and Self-Organization of Atoms in a Cavity

We theoretically investigate the correlated dynamics of N coherently driven atoms coupled to a standing-wave cavity mode. For red detuning between the driving field and the cavity as well as the atomic resonance frequencies, we predict a light force induced self-organization of the atoms into one of two possible regular patterns, which maximize the cooperative scattering of light into the cavity field. Kinetic energy is extracted from the atoms by superradiant light scattering to reach a final kinetic energy related to the cavity linewidth. The self-organization starts only above a threshold of the pump strength and atom number. We find a quadratic dependence of the cavity mode intensity on the atom number, which demonstrates the cooperative effect.