Superradiance from nitrogen-vacancy centers coupled to an ultranarrow optical cavity

Nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond have been successfully coupled to various optical structures to enhance their radiation by the Purcell effect. The participation of many NV centers in these studies may naturally lead to cooperative emission and superradiance, and our recent experimental study with a diamond membrane in a fiber-based ultranarrow optical cavity demonstrated nonlinear radiation and fast photon bunching as signatures of the collective effects. In this theoretical article, we go beyond the simple model used in the previous study to address more phenomena, such as the appearance of bunching shoulders in second-order correlation function, Rabi splitting in steady-state spectrum, and population dynamics on excited Dicke states, which for moderate pumping explains the observed collective effects. Overall, our results can guide further experiments with NV centers, and they are also relevant for other solid-state color centers, such as silicon-vacancy centers in diamond and silicon carbide, boron-vacancy centers, and carbon-related centers in hexagonal boron nitride.