Paper detail

Additivity of Röntgen term and recoil-induced correction to spontaneous emission rate

For a moving atom, the spontaneous emission rate is modified due to the contributions from two factors, the Röntgen interaction term and the recoil effect induced by the emitted photon. Here we investigate the emission rate of a uniformly moving atom near a perfectly conducting plate and obtain the corrections induced by these two factors. We find that the corrections individually induced by the Röntgen term and the recoil effect can be simply added and result in the total correction to the decay rate. Moreover, it is shown that the Röntgen term gives positive correction, while the recoil effect induces negative correction. Our work paves the way towards the future studies of the light-matter interaction for the moving particle in quantum optics.