Stationary entanglement in N-atom subradiant degenerate cascade systems

Abstract

We address ultracold N-atom degenerate cascade systems and show that stationary subradiant states, already observed in the semiclassical regime, also exist in a fully quantum regime and for a small number of atoms. We explicitly evaluate the amount of stationary entanglement for the two-atom configuration and show full inseparability for the three-atom case. We also show that a continuous variable description of the systems is not suitable to detect entanglement due to the non-Gaussianity of subradiant states. © 2011 American Physical Society.