  Optical binding is a form of light-mediated forces between elements of matter
which emerge in response to the collective scattering of light. Such phenomenon
has been studied mainly in the context of equilibrium stability of dielectric
spheres arrays which move amid dissipative media. In this letter, we
demonstrate that optically bounded states of a pair of cold atoms can exist, in
the absence of non-radiative damping. We study the scaling laws for the
unstable-stable phase transition at negative detuning and the
unstable-metastable one for positive detuning. In addition, we show that
angular momentum can lead to dynamical stabilisation with infinite range
scaling.
