Spontaneous emission of an atom near a wedge

TL;DR

This paper investigates how a perfectly conducting wedge modifies the spontaneous emission rate of an atom, providing detailed calculations and numerical results for a two-level atom system.

Contribution

It presents a detailed formalism and calculation of spontaneous emission rates for an atom near a conducting wedge, extending understanding of boundary condition effects.

Findings

Spontaneous emission rate is significantly affected by the wedge geometry.

Numerical results confirm the physical validity of the theoretical model.

The formalism can be applied to various atomic configurations near boundaries.

Abstract

It is a well known fact that non-trivial boundary conditions affect the interaction between atoms and the always present quantized electromagnetic field. In this paper, we focus on how the spontaneous emission rate of a given excited atom is altered when placed inside a perfectly conducting wedge. We begin by briefly presenting the formalism on which our calculations are founded, proceeding then to a long but straightforward calculation of the transition rate. We present results for a general atom but, for the sake of simplicity, we narrow them down to an effective two-level system in our numerical investigations. From these we conclude that the results are physically sound.