Physical Review A
Cooperative Lamb shift in an ellipsoid
Richard M. Friedberg, Jamal T. Manassah
Abstract
It has been long known that the global cooperative Lamb shift (CLS) in a large superradiantly emitting sphere has equal magnitude but opposite sign to that of a slab. This result was obtained from QED in 1973 for samples of uniform density. This change of sign holds as well for a Gaussian density distribution. The same result is also obtained for either density in the scalar simplification of QED now in frequent use. Since the CLS must be a continuous function of shape, and the slab resembles a limiting case of oblate ellipsoid, there must be some shape of ellipsoid for which the CLS is zero. We report a calculation of CLS for a Gaussian distribution of general azimuthally symmetric ellipsoidal shape. The CLS is found to vanish when the mean square radius is twice as great transversely as longitudinally.