Abstract

Spontaneous emission may be regarded as a result of the radiation-reaction fields emitted by an atom acting back on the atom itself. It is commonly (and often implicitly) assumed that the frequencies of different transitions in the atom are sufficiently different that the field radiated by one dipole is not in near resonance with any other transition. The “secular assumption” is then made that the field couples back only on the same dipole that originally sent it. In this work we study spontaneous emission without making the secular approximation.

© 1991 Optical Society of America