Spontaneous Emission Revisited

A. ROSE

Peter W. Milonni

Some of the physics of spontaneous emission in cavities is revisited, including the enhancement of the decay rate by the cavity Q, the nature of inhibited spontaneous emission, and the ‘excess noise’ in lossy laser cavities.

George William Series

Albert Rose

The cause of spontaneous emission is frequently assigned to the presence of zero-point energy in the radiation field. As such it would have no classical equivalent since zero-point energy does not exist classically. It is argued that spontaneous emission is not caused by zero-point energy but rather by an essentially classical interaction between the excited electron and its surrounding medium.

Peter R. Fontana

Sajid Qamar, Shi-Yao Zhu, Muhammad Suhail Zubairy

Autler–Townes spontaneous emission spectroscopy is revisited for a time-dependent case. We report the results of spontaneous emission spectra for nonstationary scattered light signals using the definition of the time-dependent physical spectrum. This is a rare example of problems where time-dependent spectra can be calculated exactly.