Semiclassical spin damping: Superradiance revisited

A well known description of superradiance from pointlike collections of many atoms involves the dissipative motion of a large spin. The pertinent ``superradiance master equation'' allows for a formally exact solution which we subject to a semiclassical evaluation. The clue is a saddle-point approximation for an inverse Laplace transform. All previous approximate treatments, disparate as they may appear, are encompassed in our systematic formulation. A byproduct is a hitherto unknown rigorous relation between coherences and probabilities. Our results allow for generalizations to spin dynamics with chaos in the classical limit.