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.
