  The many-body decay of extended collections of two-level systems remains an
open problem. Here, we investigate whether an array of emitters coupled to a
one-dimensional bath undergoes Dicke superradiance. This is a process whereby a
completely inverted system becomes correlated via dissipation, leading to the
release of all the energy in the form of a rapid photon burst. We derive the
minimal conditions for the burst to happen as a function of the number of
emitters, the chirality of the waveguide, and the single-emitter optical depth,
both for ordered and disordered ensembles. Many-body superradiance occurs
because the initial fluctuation that triggers the emission is amplified
throughout the decay process. In one-dimensional baths, this avalanchelike
behavior leads to a spontaneous mirror symmetry breaking, with large
shot-to-shot fluctuations in the number of photons emitted to the left and
right. Superradiant bursts may thus be a smoking gun for the generation of
correlated photon states of exotic quantum statistics.
