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Foundations

Comparison of Harmonic Oscillator Model in Classical and Quantum Theories of Light-Matter Interaction

Valery Alexandrovich Astapenko, Timur Bergaliyev

Published Sep 4, 2023• 1 citation
Publisher

Abstract

A brief review of the classical and quantum description of the interaction of electromagnetic radiation with matter based on the model of a harmonic oscillator is presented. This review includes the generalized Bohr correspondence principle, the excitation of a quantum oscillator by electromagnetic pulses including saturation effect, the harmonic limit of the Bloch equations, and a phenomenological account of the damping of the quantum oscillator. In all cases, at the mathematical level, the relationship between the classical and quantum descriptions of the electromagnetic interaction is established and the conditions for such compliance are identified.

DOI
10.3390/foundations3030031

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A brief review of the classical and quantum description of the interaction of electromagnetic radiation with matter based on the model of a harmonic oscillator is presented. This review includes the generalized Bohr correspondence principle, the excitation of a quantum oscillator by electromagnetic pulses including saturation effect, the harmonic limit of the Bloch equations, and a phenomenological account of the damping of the quantum oscillator. In all cases, at the mathematical level, the relationship between the classical and quantum descriptions of the electromagnetic interaction is established and the conditions for such compliance are identified.
The semiclassical theory of light-matter interactions describes the interaction between a classical electromagnetic field with a quantum mechanical two-level system.We show that the quantum mechanical two-level system can be modeled by a system of two coupled classical harmonic oscillators whose eigenstates are split in frequency according to the coupling strength and play the roles of the two levels of the quantum mechanical two-level system. The effect of the light field on the mechanical system is modeled as a modulation of the spring constants of the individual oscillators. Using this fully classical model, we derive the Bloch equations for a two-level system and discuss the mechanical analogues of Rabi oscillations and coherent control experiments
In this short paper, a very brief introduction of the quantum harmonic oscillator has been provided. The understanding of the transition from a classically damped oscillator and the quantum mechanical model of the latter is included via a clear mathematics involving simple calculus. Only the one dimensional time dependent Schrodinger’s equation is being studied. This paper is intended to simply provide an analytical description of the subject, there are no advance calculations implying further suggestions in quantum theory.
This first complement is devoted to a completely classical approach of lightmatter interaction which was proposed by Lorentz at the end of the nineteenth century, before the advent of quantum mechanics, but after the discovery of the electron. Lorentz' phenomenological model is based on the experimental fact that atoms have well-defined and sharp absorption lines: he assumed that atoms behaved like harmonic oscillators, in which the electrons are bound to the atomic nucleus by a restoring force which varies linearly with its displacement (from its equilibrium point close to a nucleus), and makes them oscillate at a given frequency ω 0 equal to the experimentally determined absorption frequency. Within the frame of this model, we first calculate the electromagnetic field radiated by an oscillating electron. We show that in the absence of an externally applied force the free oscillations of the electron are damped, because electromagnetic energy is radiated at the expense of mechanical energy. We then study the characteristics of the radiation that is emitted when the oscillations are forced by the application of an external oscillatory electromagnetic field of angular frequency ω. We characterize the different regimes of this scattering of the incident electromagnetic wave and finally determine the polarization induced in the atomic medium by the incident electromagnetic wave. The Lorentz model can be considered as a lowest order approximation to a description of the light–matter interaction, a better approximation being the semi-classical treatment presented in Chapter 2, and the rigorous treatment being the completely quantum mechanical model presented in Chapter 6.
Atoms and ions containing residual bound electrons do not quite resemble the simple harmonic oscillator model used so successfully in the classical theory of radiation. However, replacing the atoms or ions with sets of harmonic oscillators of a great number of discrete resonance frequencies and having various amplitudes, together with the results of classical radiation theory, go a long way toward a quantitative description of emission or absorption spectra. The set of resonance frequencies is obtained from measured or calculated energy levels using Ritz's combination principle. The amplitudes are associated with matrix elements of appropriate quantum mechanical operators between wave functions of the two energy eigenstates involved at a given frequency. In other words, quantities of the emitters, absorbers, or scatterers are described quantum-mechanically, whereas the electromagnetic field is treated classically. Such semi-classical description of matter-electromagnetic field interactions became unnecessary very early in the development of quantum theory. It will therefore not be discussed in any detail. Instead, we will begin immediately with the combined theory of matter and radiation (Heitler 1954, Dirac 1958, Loudon 1983). Quantum theory of particles and fields There are various ways to also quantize the electromagnetic fields (Cohen-Tannoudji, DuPont-Roc and Grynberg 1989), of which that performed on the combined Hamiltonian equations of motion for the field-matter system is followed here.
This chapter reviews the classical description of radiation. It describes how classical electromagnetic radiation interacts with a quantum mechanical particle. The general rule is that, even though the wave functions and the electromagnetic potentials change with the gauge, all physically observable quantities are independent of the gauge. The chapter also describes the process of the absorption of light by a system in terms of the effect of an external classical electromagnetic field on the system. The total emission rate is the sum of the induced and the spontaneous rates. Spontaneous emission is just the quantum mechanical version of the classical phenomenon of radiation from an accelerating charge. A very important consequence of the fact that the electromagnetic field is quantized is that there are vacuum fluctuations of the field, analogous to the zero point motion of a harmonic oscillator. Einstein gave a simple statistical argument to determine the rate at which spontaneous emission takes place.
Systems of interacting classical harmonic oscillators have received considerable attention in the past years as analog models for describing electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) and associated phenomena. We review these models and investigate their validity for a variety of physical systems using two and three coupled harmonic oscillators. From the simplest EIT-$\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Lambda}}$ configuration and two coupled single cavity modes we show that each atomic dipole-allowed transition and a single cavity mode can be represented by a damped harmonic oscillator. Thus, we have established a one-to-one correspondence between the classical and quantum dynamical variables. We show the limiting conditions and the equivalent for the EIT dark state in the mechanical system. This correspondence is extended to other systems that present EIT-related phenomena. Examples of such systems are two- and three-level (cavity EIT) atoms interacting with a single mode of an optical cavity and four-level atoms in a inverted-Y and tripod configurations. The established equivalence between the mechanical and the cavity EIT systems has been corroborated by experimental data. The analysis of the probe response of all these systems also brings to light a physical interpretation for the expectation value of the photon annihilation operator $\ensuremath{\langle}a\ensuremath{\rangle}$. We show that it can be directly related to the electric susceptibility of systems, the composition of which includes a driven cavity-field mode.