Delay-induced spontaneous dark state generation from two distant excited atoms

Abstract: We investigate the collective non-Markovian dynamics of two fully excited two-level atoms coupled to a one-dimensional waveguide in the presence of delay. We demonstrate that analogous to the well-known superfluorescence phenomena, where an inverted atomic ensemble synchronizes to enhance its emission, there is a `subfluorescence' effect that synchronizes the atoms into an entangled dark state depending on the interatomic separation. Our results are pertinent to long-distance quantum networks, presenting a mechanism for spontaneous entanglement generation between distant quantum emitters.