Energy-level shifts and the decay rate of an atom in the presence of a conducting wedge

Abstract

In the present article explicit expressions for the decay rate and energy level shifts of an atom in the presence of an ideal conducting wedge, two parallel plates and a half-sheet are obtained in the frame work of the canonical quantization approach. The angular and radial dependence of the decay rate for different atomic polarizations of an excited atom and also of the energy level shifts are depicted and discussed. The consistency of the present approach in some limiting cases is investigated by comparing the relevant results obtained here to the previously reported results.

Radiation properties of an oscillating atom in the presence of external fields

“…But in the vicinity of the plate, the plate effect becomes substantial. Here, we have not considered a real plate where plasmonic effects are dominant at  b 0 [14]. For ω cm /ω 0 =3 and within limit  b 0, the emission rate tends to G = G 13 25 1 .…”

“…One of the most important classical field theories with extensive applications in science and technology is the Maxwell's electromagnetic field theory. The electromagnetic quantum vacuum fluctuations is a direct result of quantizing the electromagnetic field theory that its manifestation can be approved from experimental arXiv:1909.12492v1 [quant-ph] 27 Sep 2019 observations like Casimir effect [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10] Lamb shift of atomic transitions [11,12,13,14] and spontaneous emission of an initially excited atom [14,15,16,17,18,19,20]. In addition to quantum vacuum fluctuations, there may be some external fields.…”

“…Also, the spectroscopic measurements of the atoms show that the transition frequencies of an atom in the presence of boundary conditions differ from their free space value [23]. Therefore, the radiation properties of atoms will change when they are placed in front of a metallic or dielectric surface [13,14]. On other hand, the dynamical interaction between light and moving atoms in the realm of non-relativistic atom optics has been studied extensively in related fields such as laser cooling and trapping and quantum optomechanics [24,25].…”

Motion-induced energy shifts of a multilevel atom in a black-body radiation field

“…Here we focus on the Lamb shift, i.e., the shift of the energy levels of an atom due to the perturbation of the quantum vacuum. Just like atomic spontaneous emission [1], the Lamb shift process can also be modified by external environments, for example, the presence of boundaries of quantum fields [7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14] or a change in the spacetime background [15][16][17]. Further, the presence of a e-mail: caihuabing@126.com (corresponding author) b e-mail: lgwang@zju.edu.cn real photons instead of virtual photons of vacuum fluctuations can perturb the atomic radiative properties.…”

Classical and quantum emitters near a metal surface

“…In a previous paper, we analysed a planar perfect surface as an important limiting case of a perfect conductor wedge [6]. We know that plasmonic excitation is not possible for the perfect conductors.…”