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Physical Review A

Approach to the theory of radiation-matter interaction for arbitrary field strength

Weihan Tan, Weiping Lu, Robert G. Harrison

Published Dec 1, 1992• 3 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We report an alternative approach to describe radiation-matter interaction that extends conventional perturbation theory to accommodate arbitrary field strength by introducing the concept of self-regulated partitioning of the interaction Hamiltonian. The treatment gives a clear physical insight into field-induced splitting of the states, called here partially dressed states, and also accounts for the transition of energy between the states. In general these states are characterized by the strength and form of the field-matter interaction and determined by comparison with density-matrix analysis. Using these states as base states, this theory allows for a perturbation-expansion analysis for arbitrary interaction strength. This treatment provides an analytic basis for describing multilevel radiation interactions, and by way of example we consider its application to third-harmonic generation.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.46.7128

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We report an alternative approach to describe radiation-matter interaction that extends conventional perturbation theory to accommodate arbitrary field strength by introducing the concept of self-regulated partitioning of the interaction Hamiltonian. The treatment gives a clear physical insight into field-induced splitting of the states, called here partially dressed states, and also accounts for the transition of energy between the states. In general these states are characterized by the strength and form of the field-matter interaction and determined by comparison with density-matrix analysis. Using these states as base states, this theory allows for a perturbation-expansion analysis for arbitrary interaction strength. This treatment provides an analytic basis for describing multilevel radiation interactions, and by way of example we consider its application to third-harmonic generation.
In describing the nonlinear interaction of radiation with matter it is well known that the perturbation expansion technique is used to calculate the atomic wave functions and the transitions between the states of a system. However the technique, though involving all states of the system, is valid only in the limit of weak interaction fields and non-resonant interactions. For strong fields and resonant interactions, density matrix or dressed atom formulisms are commonly used though these exact treatments are restricted to simple two level schemes or approximations of these; their application to general resonant-near resonant multilevel interactions being prohibitively complex.
Many dynamical processes of interest are either initiated or probed by light, and their understanding requires some knowledge of this subject. This chapter is included in order to make this text self contained by providing an overview of subjects that are used in various applications later in the text. In particular, it aims to supplement the elementary view of radiation–matter interaction as a time-dependent perturbation in the Hamiltonian, by describing some aspects of the quantum nature of the radiation field. This is done on two levels: The main body of this chapter is an essentially qualitative overview that ends with a treatment of spontaneous emission as an example. The Appendix gives some more details on the mathematical structure of the theory. In elementary treatments of the interaction of atoms and molecules with light, the radiation field is taken as a classical phenomenon.
A diagrammatic density matrix technique is developed and applied to study nonlinear optical processes involving responses from weak probe fields interacting with a system under strong excitation. These diagrams consist of lowest-order double-Feynman diagrams which represent the density matrix perturbation terms describing the system response to the weak probe fields1,2 combined with dressed propagators which represent the density matrix elements of the system under strong excitation. The dressed propagators are described by a set of linear equations which, in most cases, may be derived in inspection. The methodology is similar to the bare-atom approach.2 The advantages of using this diagrammatic technique are that (1) it allows one to select and express analytically the dominant and appropriate density matrix elements (diagrams and dressed propagators); (2) analytical expressions may be constructed directly from the diagrams and thus lengthy calculations needed to obtain closed-form solutions are greatly reduced; (3) it provides a physical interpretation for the density matrix solutions and nonlinear optical processes; and (4) it may be generalized to more complicated, multilevel systems. We demonstrate the application of this technique to describe gain saturation, Stark splitting, and Raman scattering.
We consider a multilevel atom such as an hydrogen atom, interacting with the quantum electromagnetic field, in the dressed ground state of the interacting system. We evaluate by perturbation theory the dressed ground state of the system, within dipole approximation; we investigate and review the effect of the self-dressing of the atom on several field and atomic observables. Specifically, we obtain general expressions of the renormalized electric and magnetic field fluctuations and energy densities around the atom, and analyze their scaling with the distance from the atom, obtaining approximated expressions in the so-called near and far zone. We also investigate nonlocal spatial field correlations around the atom. We stress how the quantities we evaluate can be probed through two- and three-body nonadditive Casimir-Polder dispersion interactions. We also investigate the effect of the self-dressing, i.e. of the virtual transitions occurring in the dressed ground state, on atomic observables, for example the average potential energy of the electron in the nuclear field; this also allows us to obtain a more fundamental quantum basis for the Welton interpretation of the Lamb shift of a ground-state hydrogen atom, in terms of the atomic self-dressing processes.
We present a new formulation of perturbation theory for quantum systems, designated here as: “mean field perturbation theory” (MFPT), which is free from power-series-expansion in any physical parameter, including the coupling strength. Its application is thereby extended to deal with interactions of arbitrary strength and to compute system-properties having non-analytic dependence on the coupling, thus overcoming the primary limitations of the “standard formulation of perturbation theory” (SFPT). MFPT is defined by developing perturbation about a chosen input Hamiltonian, which is exactly solvable but which acquires the nonlinearity and the analytic structure (in the coupling strength) of the original interaction through a self-consistent, feedback mechanism. We demonstrate Borel-summability of MFPT for the case of the quartic- and sextic-anharmonic oscillators and the quartic double-well oscillator (QDWO) by obtaining uniformly accurate results for the ground state of the above systems for arbitrary physical values of the coupling strength. The results obtained for the QDWO may be of particular significance since “renormalon”-free, unambiguous results are achieved for its spectrum in contrast to the well-known failure of SFPT in this case.
The conventional perturbation theory in quantum mechanics for the interaction of electromagnetic radiation with matter, which is based on the time-dependent vector and scalar potentials, is shown to be dependent on the gauge. The problem is reformulated, using the approach of Yang, in a gauge-invariant way, in which the transitions between states are induced by the quantum-mechanical power operator. In order to use an unperturbed Hamiltonian which does not involve the electromagnetic field, the gauge is chosen to give the electric dipole interaction. This choice can be made if the magnetic field is negligible and the electric field is slowly varying over atomic dimensions. For a comparison of the gauge-invariant and conventional formulation, a two-level atom in a radiation field is considered. For the probability that an atom originally in the lower state will make a transition to the upper state when the field is not in resonance, the gauge-invariant formulation gives the correct result, whereas the gauge-dependent formulation gives an incorrect result.