Correlated many-body noise and emergent 1/f behavior*

Fluctuating electric fields emanating from surfaces are a major possible source of decoherence in a number of quantum applications, including trapped ions and near-surface NV diamond qubits. We show that at low temperatures, due to superradiant decay, phonon-induced excitation exchange between adsorbed atoms can counterintuitively mitigate the electric field noise. This contrasts with perhaps the anticipated behavior of corrrelated dynamics amplifying detrimental noise. We derive an exact mapping between the noise spectrum of N interacting fluctuators with M vibrational levels to (N+M-1 \choose N)-1 noninteracting two-level dipoles. The anharmonic interaction of the fluctuators with the surface is semiempirical and physically motivated. This anharmonicity affects the noise spectral power intensity at higher temperatures which we simulate numerically. We describe conditions for which the ubiquitous 1/f noise emerges naturally from the coupled dynamics of, remarkbly, identical fluctuators and whose behavior depends critically on correlation among the fluctuators. We believe this work constitutes the first derivation of correlated superradiant noise and emergent 1/f behavior.