Initial stage of a superradiance pulse in the case of delayed or prolonged excitation of matter

The delay time of the principal superradiance pulse is found theoretically for the cases when a longitudinal wide-band pump pulse is long on the time scale of the output radiation or when such a pump pulse travels along an active medium more slowly than the optical wave. A comparison is made of the delay times of the forward and reverse waves. A linearized semiclassical problem (one-dimensional case) with a random source is solved for the amplitude of the radiation field.