  Light transport in a dense and disordered cold atomic ensemble, where the
cooperation of atomic dipoles essentially modifies their coupling with the
radiation modes, offers an alternative approach to light-matter interfacing
protocols. Here, we show how the cooperativity and quasi-static dipole
interaction affect the process of light propagation under the conditions of
electromagnetically-induced transparency (EIT). We perform comparative analysis
of the self-consistent approach with ab-initio microscopic calculations and
emphasize the role of the interatomic interaction in the dipoles' dynamics. Our
results show that in such a dense and strongly disordered system the EIT-based
light storage protocol stays relatively insensitive to configuration variations
and can be obtained with essentially less atoms than it is normally needed for
dilute configurations.
