Spontaneous emission and the operation of invisibility cloaks: Can the invisibility cloaks render objects invisible in quantum mechanic domain?

TL;DR

This study investigates whether ideal invisibility cloaks can effectively conceal objects in the quantum domain by analyzing spontaneous emission rates of atoms near cloaks, revealing frequency-dependent cloaking performance.

Contribution

The paper introduces a quantum electrodynamics framework for analyzing atomic emission near invisibility cloaks, providing analytical and numerical insights into quantum-level cloaking effectiveness.

Findings

Cloaks effectively conceal objects far from resonance frequency.

Near resonance, cloaks are less effective and objects become more visible.

Quantum emission properties are significantly altered by cloaking materials.

Abstract

As a probe to explore the ability of invisibility cloaks to conceal objects in the quantum mechanics domain, we study the spontaneous emission rate of an excited two-level atom in the vicinity of an ideal invisibility cloaking. On this base, first, a canonical quantization scheme is presented for the electromagnetic field interacting with atomic systems in an anisotropic, inhomogeneous and absorbing magnetodielectric medium which can suitably be used for studying the influence of arbitrary invisibility cloak on the atomic radiative properties. The time dependence of the atomic subsystem is obtained in the Schrodinger picture. By introducing a modified set of the spherical wave vector functions, the Green tensor of the system is calculated via the continuous and discrete methods. In this formalism, the decay rate and as well the emission pattern of the aforementioned atom are computed analytically for both weak and strong coupling interaction, and then numerically calculations are done to demonstrate the performances of cloaking in the quantum mechanics domain. Special attention is paid to different possible orientations and locations of atomic system near the spherical invisibility cloaking. Results in the presence and the absence of the invisibility cloak are compared. We find that the cloak works very well far from its resonance frequency to conceal a macroscopic object, whereas at near the resonance frequency the object is more visible than the situation that the object is not covered by the cloak.