Abstract
Emission and absorption of light lie at the heart of light–matter interaction1. Although emission and absorption rates are regarded as intrinsic properties of atoms and molecules, various ways to modify these rates have been sought in applications such as quantum information processing2, metrology3 and light-energy harvesting4. One promising approach is to utilize collective behaviour of emitters in the same way as in superradiance5. Although superradiance has been observed in diverse systems3,6,7,8,9,10, its conceptual counterpart in absorption has never been realized11 until now. Here we demonstrate enhanced cooperative absorption—superabsorption—by implementing a time-reversal process of superradiance. The observed superabsorption rate is much higher than that of ordinary absorption, with the number of absorbed photons scaling with the square of the number of atoms, exhibiting the cooperative nature of superabsorption. The present superabsorption—which performs beyond the limitations of conventional absorption—can facilitate weak-signal sensing1, light-energy harvesting11 and light–matter quantum interfaces2.
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Data availability
The data that support the plots within this paper and other findings of this study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request. Source data are provided with this paper.
Code availability
All data are obtained from the experiments or from analytic formulae discussed in the manuscript. No special computer codes were used to generate the results reported in this paper.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by Samsung Science and Technology Foundation (project no. SSTF-BA1502-05), National Research Foundation (grant no. 2020R1A2C3009299) and the Ministry of Science and ICT of Korea under ITRC programme (grant no. IITP-2019-2018-0-01402).
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D.Y. and K.A. conceived the experiment. D.Y. performed experiments with help from S.O., J.H. and G.S. D.Y. analysed the data and carried out theoretical investigations with help from J.U.K. K.A. supervised overall experimental and theoretical works. D.Y. and K.A. wrote the manuscript. All authors participated in discussions.
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Supplementary Notes 1–12 and Figs. 1–6.
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Source data for Fig. 4 in the main text.
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Yang, D., Oh, Sh., Han, J. et al. Realization of superabsorption by time reversal of superradiance. Nat. Photonics 15, 272–276 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-021-00770-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-021-00770-6
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