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Physical Review A

Quantum electrodynamics in a cavity

Edwin Albert Power, T. Thirunamachandran

Published May 1, 1982• 136 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The theory of interaction of atoms and molecules with radiation confined in a cavity is presented. The effect of the confinement on the field commutation relations is examined and the modified commutation relations are derived for an arbitrary cavity. It is shown that a canonical transformation on the minimal-coupling Hamiltonian for such systems leads to a new Hamiltonian containing explicitly neither the interatomic nor the atom image potentials. The new multipolar Hamiltonian is used to calculate energy shifts of an atom and a pair of atoms near a conducting wall. Changes in the rate of spontaneous emission from an excited atom are also evaluated.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.25.2473

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arXiv:1702.00438•Physical Review A•Oct 24, 2017•20 citations
The theory of interaction of atoms and molecules with radiation confined in a cavity is presented. The effect of the confinement on the field commutation relations is examined and the modified commutation relations are derived for an arbitrary cavity. It is shown that a canonical transformation on the minimal-coupling Hamiltonian for such systems leads to a new Hamiltonian containing explicitly neither the interatomic nor the atom image potentials. The new multipolar Hamiltonian is used to calculate energy shifts of an atom and a pair of atoms near a conducting wall. Changes in the rate of spontaneous emission from an excited atom are also evaluated.
The normal modes of electromagnetic fields satisfying three different boundary conditions are constructed systematically. For each of these cases, cavity quantization of the electromagnetic fields is carried out explicitly. It is possible, using normal modes, to perform a unitary transformation of the minimal-coupling Hamiltonian of an atom inside the cavity to a multipolar form. It is shown that the boundary condition plays an important role in the transition rates for the spontaneous emission by the atom. Some explicit calculations are carried out for several different boundary conditions. These results become consistent with those for free space in the large-box limit.
Introduction Ever since 1916/17 when Einstein argued [45] [46] that spontaneous emission must occur if matter and radiation are to achieve thermal equilibrium, physicists have believed that spontaneous emission is an inherent quantum mechanical property of atoms and that excited atoms inevitably radiate. This view, however, overlooks the fact that spontaneous emission is a consequence of the coupling of quantized energy states of atoms with the quantized radiation field, and is a manifestation of quantum noise or of emission ‘stimulated’ by ‘vacuum fluctuations’. An infinity of vacuum states is available to the photon radiated by an excited atom placed in free space, leading to the effective irreversibility of such emissions. If these vacuum states are modified, as for example by placing an excited atom between closely spaced mirrors or in a small cavity (essentially the Casimir effect), spontaneous emission can be greatly inhibited or enhanced or even made reversible. Recent advances in atomic and optical techniques have made it possible to control and manipulate spontaneous emission. A whole new branch of quantum optics called ‘cavity QED’ has developed since 1987 utilizing these dramatic changes in spontaneous emission rates in cavities to construct new kinds of microscopic masers or micromasers that operate with a single atom and a few photons or with photons emitted in pairs in a two-photon transition.
We consider the situation where a two-level atom is placed in the vicinity of the center of a spherical cavity with a large numerical aperture. The vacuum field at the center of the cavity is actually equivalent to the one obtained in a microcavity, and both the dissipative and the reactive parts of the atom's spontaneous emission are significantly modified. Using an explicit calculation of the spatial dependence of the radiative relaxation rate and of the associated level shift, we show that for a weakly excitating light field, the atom can be attracted to the center of the cavity by vacuum-induced light shifts.
Abstract The atom-field interaction is formulated within the fully quantized-field theory, starting from a detailed analysis of the transformation from the fundamental minimal coupling interaction Hamiltonian to the electric dipole Hamiltonian used extensively in quantum optics. Spontaneous emission, radiative level shifts, and the natural radiative lineshape are treated in both the Schrodinger and Heisenberg pictures, with emphasis on the roles of vacuum field fluctuations, radiation reaction, and the fluctuation-dissipation relation between them. The shortcomings of semiclassical radiation theories are discussed.
Over the past ten years, our group has investigated the effects of confinement on atoms inside metallic micron–sized cavities in order to elucidate some basic phenomena in the field of cavity quantum electrodynamics (QED). The first of these was the inhibition of spontaneous emission from an atom inside a cavity. This was followed by a laser spectroscopic measurement of the van der Waals interaction between a single Rydberg atom and a gold cavity, which showed that a simple electrostatic model of the atom–cavity interaction is correct when the cavity is small enough. More recently, the retarded Casimir–Polder force was measured between a ground state sodium atom and a large cavity, demonstrating that the van der Waals potential fails at long enough range and that the vacuum fluctuations of the field then have an important role in the interaction of the atom with the cavity. Our group is now pushing forward these investigations to study cavities whose walls have losses and dispersion, where the theory of cavity QED is significantly more complicated. With real surfaces, we have to deal with the complex dielectric response ε(ω) of the material, which exhibits frequency–dependent absorption and dispersion. One particularly interesting case is when a downward transition in the atom is resonant with an excitation of the cavity walls. This opens a new branch for the atomic decay: as an alternative to creating a photon within the space surrounded by the cavity walls the atomic decay can now create an electromagnetic excitation of the walls themselves. Another novel feature of our experiments is that the Bohr frequencies of the atom are close to the kT/h, where T is room temperature. We therefore expect to be able to measure effects associated with QED at finite temperature; in other words, to study how the blackbody radiation affects our experiments. By conducting experiments with real surfaces, we hope to elucidate and perhaps simplify the theoretical models used to describe these systems.
We compute the energies of the interaction between two atoms placed in the middle of a perfectly reflecting planar cavity, in the weak-coupling nondegenerate regime. Both inhibition and enhancement of the interactions can be obtained by varying the size of the cavity. We derive exact expressions for the dyadic Green's function of the cavity field which mediates the interactions and apply time-dependent quantum perturbation theory in the adiabatic approximation. We provide explicit expressions for the van der Waals potentials of two polarizable atomic dipoles and the electrostatic potential of two induced dipoles. We compute the van der Waals potentials in three different scenarios: two atoms in their ground states, two atoms excited, and two dissimilar atoms with one of them excited. In addition, we calculate the phase-shift rate of the two-atom wave function in each case. The effect of the two-dimensional confinement of the electromagnetic field on the dipole-dipole interactions is analyzed. This effect depends on the atomic polarization. For dipole moments oriented parallel to the cavity plates, both the electrostatic and the van der Waals interactions are exponentially suppressed for values of the cavity width much less than the interatomic distance, whereas for values of the width close to the interatomic distance, the strength of both interactions is higher than their values in the absence of cavity. For dipole moments perpendicular to the plates, the strength of the van der Waals interaction decreases for values of the cavity width close to the interatomic distance, while it increases for values of the width much less than the interatomic distance with respect to its strength in the absence of cavity. We illustrate these effects by computing the dipole-dipole interactions between two alkali atoms in circular Rydberg states.