Europhysics Letters (EPL)
Can spontaneous emission be influenced by the presence of a distant detector?
B. Crosignani, Paolo Di Porto
Abstract
We show that the spontaneous-emission process could be altered by continuously monitoring the emitting system by means of a spherical counter of quantum efficiency η < 1, placed at a finite distance L . This surprising result is related neither to Zeno's effect nor to any cavity effect, but is of intrinsically quantum-mechanical non-local nature.