Superbunching from Coherently Driven Atoms in a Waveguide

Journal article, 2026

We investigate the scattered field from N identical two-level atoms resonantly driven by a weak coherent field in a one-dimensional waveguide. For atoms separated by the drive wavelength, increasing the number of atoms suppresses transmission while enhancing photon bunching. Transmission becomes a super-bunched (N + 1)-photon scattering process that is predominantly incoherent. Remarkably, we find that transmission occurs through a process where all N atoms are excited, enabling novel heralded multiphoton state generation with applications in long-distance entanglement and quantum metrology.