Space-time formulation of quantum transitions

Abstract

In a previous paper we have studied dressed excited states in the Friedrichs model, which describes a two-level atom interacting with radiation. In our approach, excited states are distributions (or generalized functions) in the Liouville space. These states decay in a strictly exponential way. In contrast, the states one may construct in the Hilbert space of wave functions always present deviations from exponential decay. We have considered the momentum representation, which is applicable to global quantities (trace, energy transfer). Here we study the space-time description of local quantities associated with dressed unstable states, such as, the intensity of the photon field. In this situation the excited states become factorized in Gamow states. To go from local quantities to global quantities, we have to proceed to an integration over space, which is far from trivial. There are various elements that appear in the space-time evolution of the system: the unstable cloud that surrounds the bare atom, the emitted real photons and the ``Zeno photons,'' which are associated with deviations from exponential decay. We consider a Hilbert space approximation to our dressed excited state. This approximation leads already to decay close to exponential in the field surrounding the atom, and to a line shape different from the Lorentzian line shape. Our results are compared with numerical simulations. We show that the time evolution of an unstable state satisfies a Boltzmann-like $\mathcal{H}$ theorem. This is applied to emission and absorption as well as scattering. The existence of a microscopic $\mathcal{H}$ theorem is not astonishing. The excited states are ``nonequilibrium'' states and their time evolution leads to the emission of photons, which distributes the energy of the unstable state among the field modes.