  We study the influence of cooperative effects such as superradiance and
subradiance, on the scattering properties of dilute atomic gases. We show that
cooperative effects lead to an effective potential between pairs of atoms that
decays like $1/r$. In the case of superradiance, this potential is attractive
for close enough atoms and can be interpreted as a coherent mesoscopic effect.
We consider a model of multiple scattering of a photon among superradiant pairs
and calculate the elastic mean free path and the group velocity. We study first
the case of a scalar wave which allows to obtain and to understand basic
features of cooperative effects and multiple scattering. We then turn to the
general problem of a vector wave. In both cases, we obtain qualitatively
similar results and derive, for the case of a scalar wave, analytic expressions
of the elastic mean free path and of the group velocity for an arbitrary (near
resonance) detuning.
