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Journal of Mathematical Physics

On a model of a harmonic oscillator coupled to a quantized, massless, scalar field. I

Asao Arai

Published Nov 1, 1981• 52 citations
Publisher

Abstract

As a first step towards giving a rigorous mathematical interpretation to the Lamb shift, a system of a harmonic oscillator coupled to a quantized, massless, scalar field is studied rigorously with special attention to the spectral property of the total Hamiltonian. It is proved that the point spectra of the harmonic oscillator disappear completely into the continuous spectrum due to the interaction with the quantized field.

DOI
10.1063/1.524830

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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 When the cavity mode is tuned to the atomic oscillator frequency, the perturbation-theory Lamb-shift calculation is no longer valid, and the exact solution derived in this paper predicts a resonant Lamb shift that is significantly larger than the off-resonant single-mode Lamb shift.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.

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As a first step towards giving a rigorous mathematical interpretation to the Lamb shift, a system of a harmonic oscillator coupled to a quantized, massless, scalar field is studied rigorously with special attention to the spectral property of the total Hamiltonian. It is proved that the point spectra of the harmonic oscillator disappear completely into the continuous spectrum due to the interaction with the quantized field.
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.
The study of quantum properties of the harmonic oscillator is important in physics as many real-world systems oscillate harmonically. Motion of systems in a confined space is often modeled as being a quantized harmonic motion or, in first instance, is approximated by a harmonic motion. This chapter helps the reader to solve the equation employing an algebraic operator technique, which is based on the Dirac notation. This approach has several definite advantages and exploits the commutation relations among the operators involved and their properties. The chapter transforms the stationary Schrodinger equation into a second-order differential equation and finds the solution to the equation with the aid of a more advanced mathematical technique that involves special functions. The energy of a harmonic oscillator is quantized, with the sequence of values. The difference in energy between adjacent energy levels is equal to the energy of a single photon, ħω.
Spectra of the most general Hermitian Hamiltonian which is bilinear in the creation and annihilation operators of a q-harmonic oscillator are investigated with the help of the factorization method. It is shown that there are two factorization schemes leading to discrete spectra of complicated forms. For q-oscillator models with continuous spectrum the Hamiltonian may have normalizable eigenstates of infinite multiplicity. Existence of the continuous spectrum in the interacting system is also discussed.
We study a one-dimensional single-excitation model of a scalar photon field coupled to a continuum of two-level atoms with quadratic density. The resulting matrix Hamiltonian has an unbounded spatially varying coupling and is not semibounded. We prove that it is essentially self-adjoint and determine its spectrum explicitly. The continuous spectrum is the half-line (−∞,Ω](-\infty,Ω](−∞,Ω], where ΩΩΩ is the atomic resonance frequency, while the spectrum above ΩΩΩ consists of a strictly increasing sequence of simple eigenvalues. These eigenvalues are characterized by the interlaced zeros of the Airy function and its derivative and satisfy \begin{align*} ω_n = \left(\frac{3πg n}{4}\right)^{1/2} + \fracΩ{4} + O(n^{-1/2}). \end{align*} The analysis is based on a nonlinear spectral reduction that yields a confining massless relativistic oscillator above ΩΩΩ and an inverted oscillator below ΩΩΩ.
A system of a particle and a harmonic oscillator, which have pure point spectra if uncoupled, is known to acquire an absolutely continuous spectrum when they are coupled by a sufficiently strong point interaction. Here, the dynamical mechanism underlying this spectral phenomenon is exposed. The energy of the oscillator is proven to exponentially diverge in time, while the spatial probability distribution of the particle collapses into a δ-function at the interaction point. On account of this result, a generalized model with many oscillators which interact with the particle at different points is argued to provide a formal model for the approximate measurement of position and collapse of wave packets.