Collective effects in the interaction of light with ensembles of identical scatterers play an important role in many fields of physics. However, often the term “identical” is not accurate due to the presence of hyperfine fields which induce inhomogeneous transition shifts and splittings. Here we develop a formalism based on the Green's-function method to model the linear response of such inhomogeneous ensembles in one-dimensional waveguides. We obtain a compact formula for the collective spectrum, which exhibits deviations from the uniform frequency shift and broadening expected of two-level systems. In particular, if the coherent contribution to the collective coupling is large, the effect of inhomogeneous broadening can be suppressed, with the linewidth approaching that of the superradiant value. We apply this formalism to describe collective effects in x-ray scattering off thin-film waveguides for inhomogeneous hyperfine parameters.

• Received 24 February 2021
• Accepted 2 August 2021

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.104.033702

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI. Open access publication funded by the Max Planck Society.

Published by the American Physical Society