Abstract

Recently, there has been great experimental interest in studying the behavior of active atoms embedded in a dielectric medium because of the possibility of manipulating the spontaneous decay rate of these atoms.¹ More important, the decay rate of such atoms warrants special study as it is affected by additional physical factors not present in cavity QED. We show that the usual value given for one of these additional factors is incorrect, and the correct value can be related to a basic property of the standard QED Hamiltonian.

© 1990 Optical Society of America