Paper detail

Spontaneous emission of an atom near a wedge

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.