The progress in high-precision spectroscopy requires one to verify the accuracy of theoretical models such as the master equation describing spontaneous emission of atoms. For this purpose, we apply the coarse-graining method to derive a master equation of an atom interacting with the modes of the electromagnetic field. This master equation naturally includes terms due to quantum interference in the decay channels and fulfills the requirements of the Lindblad theorem without the need of phenomenological assumptions. We then consider the spectroscopy of the 2S-4P line of atomic Hydrogen and show that these interference terms, typically neglected, significantly contribute to the photon count signal. These results can be important in understanding spectroscopic measurements performed in recent experiments for testing the validity of quantum electrodynamics.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figure

We develop a new expansion for representing singular sums in terms of integrals and vice versa. This method provides a powerful tool for the efficient computation of large singular sums that appear in long-range interacting systems in condensed matter and quantum physics. It also offers a generalised trapezoidal rule for the precise computation of singular integrals. In both cases, the difference between sum and integral is approximated by derivatives of the non-singular factor of the summand function, where the coefficients in turn depend on the singularity. We show that for a physically meaningful set of functions, the error decays exponentially with the expansion order. For a fixed expansion order, the error decays algebraically both with the grid size, if the method is used for quadrature, or the characteristic length scale of the summand function in case the sum over a fixed grid is approximated by an integral. In absence of a singularity, the method reduces to the Euler–Maclaurin summation formula. We demonstrate the numerical performance of our new expansion by applying it to the computation of the full nonlinear long-range forces inside a domain wall in a macroscopic one-dimensional crystal with $$2\times 10^{10}$$ 2 × 10 10 particles. The code of our implementation in Mathematica is provided online. For particles that interact via the Coulomb repulsion, we demonstrate that finite size effects remain relevant even in the thermodynamic limit of macroscopic particle numbers. Our results show that widely-used continuum limits in condensed matter physics are not applicable for quantitative predictions in this case.

We extend the classical Euler–Maclaurin (EM) expansion to sums over multidimensional lattices that involve functions with algebraic singularities. This offers a tool for a precise and fast evaluation of singular sums that appear in multidimensional long-range interacting systems. We find that the approximation error decays exponentially with the expansion order for band-limited functions and that the runtime is independent of the number of particles. First, the EM summation formula is generalised to lattices in higher dimensions, assuming a sufficiently regular summand function. We then develop this new expansion further and construct the singular Euler–Maclaurin expansion in higher dimensions, an extension of our previous work in one dimension, which remains applicable and useful even if the summand function includes a singular function factor. We connect our method to analytical number theory and show that all operator coefficients can be efficiently computed from derivatives of the Epstein zeta function. Finally we demonstrate the numerical performance of the expansion and efficiently compute singular lattice sums in infinite two-dimensional lattices, which are of relevance in condensed matter, statistical, and quantum physics. An implementation in mathematica is provided online along with this article.

Continuum limits are a powerful tool in the study of many-body systems, yet their validity is often unclear when long-range interactions are present. In this work, we rigorously address this issue and put forth an exact representation of long-range interacting lattices that separates the model into a term describing its continuous analogue, the integral contribution, and a term that fully resolves the microstructure, the lattice contribution. For any system dimension, any lattice, any power-law interaction and for linear, nonlinear, and multi-atomic lattices, we show that the lattice contribution can be described by a differential operator based on the multidimensional generalization of the Riemann zeta function, namely the Epstein zeta function. We determine the conditions under which this contribution becomes particularly relevant, demonstrating the existence of quasi scale-invariant lattice contributions in a wide range of fundamental physical phenomena. Our representation provides a broad set of tools for studying the analytical properties of the system and it yields an efficient numerical method for the evaluation of the arising lattice sums. We benchmark its performance by computing classical forces and energies in three important physical examples, in which the standard continuum approximation fails: Skyrmions in a two-dimensional long-range interacting spin lattice, defects in ion chains, and spin waves in a three-dimensional pyrochlore lattice with dipolar interactions. We demonstrate that our method exhibits the accuracy of exact summation at the numerical cost of an integral approximation, allowing for precise simulations of long-range interacting systems even at macroscopic scales. Finally, we apply our analytical tool set to the study of quantum spin lattices and derive anomalous quantum spin wave dispersion relations due to long-range interactions in arbitrary dimensions.

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