LAUSR

Abstract Collective phenomena in the Tavis–Cummings model has been widely studied, focusing on the phase transition features. On many occasions, it has been used variational approaches that consider separated radiation-matter systems. This paper examines the role of the quantum entanglement of an assembly of two-level emitters coupled to a single-mode cavity; this allows us to characterise the quantum correlated state for each regime. Statistical properties of the system, e.g., the first four statistical moments, show clearly the structure of the light and matter distributions even though the second-order correlation function goes to one in some regimes; the statistical analysis evidences a sharp departure from coherent behaviour, contrary to the common understanding.