Spontaneous emission of an excited atom in a randomly occupied optical lattice

Abstract

The problem of spontaneous emission of an excited atom embedded inside a randomly occupied optical lattice is discussed herein by explicitly calculating the emission rate of the atom. After separately analyzing two properties of the lattice, a long range of regularity and randomness, we find that since the statistics of the density fluctuations of the trapped atoms on the lattice favor higher-order correlations whose numerical values are nevertheless rather small, the randomness merely plays a weak role, compared with the regularity, in determining the atom’s spontaneous emission rate. We also find that the number of multiple scattering channels, previously defined [Phys. Rev. E 69 (2004) 036602] to describe light propagation inside a discrete medium with a long range of regularity, is still important in the atom’s radiative evolution: As it changes from one value to another, the atom’s spontaneous emission rate is brought to local extreme values.