Perturbation of Quantum Harmonic Oscillator and its effect on Quantum Electromagnetic Field Theory

Thomas P. Pearsall

Thomas P. Pearsall

Sankarshan Sahu

Here a special case of perturbation in quantum harmonic oscillator is studied. Here we assume the perturbed potential to be a Harmonic Oscillator that has been shifted in the position space.We construct the new creation and annihilation operators for the new Hamiltonian to find out its energy eigenstates. What is interesting about the solution of this system is that we find out that the ground state of this system is a coherent state of the ground state of the original harmonic oscillator. We know that the Hamiltonian of electromagnetic field is similar to that of the harmonic oscillator where the electric field and magnetic field are expressed in terms of time evolution of annihilation and creation operators. According to the quantum electromagnetic field theory, photon states are expressed as the coherent states of the ground states of the unperturbed harmonic oscillator.In the previous research works,it has been established how coherent states provide a better picture of Electric field compared to the energy eigenstates. This paper mainly deals with why the coherent states provide a more complete picture of electric and magnetic field theory compared to just energy eigenstates. Here we find how our perturbation act as a coherent state generator and adds a new term in the Hamiltonian. The Perturbation is thought to arise from the only available interaction i.e. observation. The perturbation also explains how observation leads to coherence of photon states. We will find out how the new perturbation affects the time evolution of electromagnetic field. This also explains how the classical electromagnetic field theory takes into account the factor of observation, due to which the classical laws are in perfect agreement with the quantum laws.

Carlo Jacoboni

P. V. Elyutin

Michael D. Crisp

The interaction of an atomic system with a single mode of a quantized electromagnetic field is investigated in the dipole approximation. Two approximations that are almost always made in this analysis are the neglect of the diamagnetic term in the Hamiltonian and the dropping of the rotating-wave approximation (RWA) terms that correspond to processes that do not conserve energy. Both approximations involve the neglect of terms that are of the same order of magnitude so that consistency demands that they be considered together. It is demonstrated that, in the dipole approximation, a minor modification of the usual application of quantum electrodynamics to any atomic system can exactly incorporate the effects of the diamagnetic term into a new frequency of the electromagnetic cavity mode; this frequency is slightly different from that of the empty cavity. This result is then applied to the specific case of a charged harmonic oscillator interacting with a single mode. For this simple model an analytic solution can then be found that includes the effects of the diamagnetic term and does not use the RWA. It is found that, for off resonance, the normal modes of the coupled system oscillate at shifted frequencies which are in agreement with the second-order perturbation-theory calculation of the Lamb shift. When the cavity mode is tuned to the atomic oscillator frequency, the perturbation-theory Lamb-shift calculation is no longer valid, and the exact solution derived in this paper predicts a resonant Lamb shift that is significantly larger than the off-resonant single-mode Lamb shift. Furthermore, the frequency spectrum is qualitatively changed from the single frequency of the free atomic system to a doublet spectrum. An analytic solution of this harmonic-oscillator problem can also be found when the RWA terms are dropped from the Hamiltonian. Comparison of the two solutions reveals that the RWA terms contribute a frequency shift of magnitude independent of the field intensity in the simple case of a charged harmonic oscillator.When trajectories of the exact and RWA solutions are compared in phase space, it is found that one effect of the RWA terms is to lift a twofold degeneracy of the phase-space orbits that occurs when the RWA terms are neglected. The harmonic-oscillator problem has several features in common with the interaction of a two-level atom with a single quantized field mode. Both Hamiltonians exhibit inversion symmetry and hence have parity as a good quantum number. Both Hamiltonians contain RWA terms. When these RWA terms are neglected, both Hamiltonians have a new constant of motion that can be identified with the total number of excitations in the combined system.