X-Nico

unusual facts about spontaneous emission


Spectral line

The uncertainty principle relates the lifetime of an excited state (due to the spontaneous radiative decay or the Auger process) with the uncertainty of its energy.


Jaynes–Cummings model

This model was originally proposed in 1963 by Edwin Jaynes and Fred Cummings in order to study the relationship between the quantum theory of radiation and the semi-classical theory in describing the phenomenon of spontaneous emission.

Laser science

Albert Einstein created the foundations for the laser and maser in 1917, via a paper in which he re-derived Max Planck’s law of radiation using a formalism based on probability coefficients (Einstein coefficients) for the absorption, spontaneous emission, and stimulated emission of electromagnetic radiation.

Rabi problem

The classical Rabi problem gives some basic results and a simple to understand picture of the issue, but in order to understand phenomena such as inversion, spontaneous emission, and the Bloch-Siegert shift, a fully quantum mechanical treatment is necessary.

Stephan W. Koch

(abbreviated as SLEs); the SLEs describe the quantum physics where quantum fluctuations of light initiate incoherent light emission from spontaneous recombination of Coulomb-coupled electron–hole pairs.


see also

Decoherence-free subspaces

Noteworthy is also independent work by Martin Plenio, Vlatko Vedral and Peter Knight who constructed an error correcting code with codewords that are invariant under a particular unitary time evolution in spontaneous emission.