Virtual Resonant Emission and Oscillatory Long-Range Tails in van der Waals Interactions of Excited States: QED Treatment and Applications

Abstract

We report on a quantum electrodynamic (QED) investigation of the interaction between a ground state atom with another atom in an excited state. General expressions, applicable to any atom, are indicated for the long-range tails which are due to virtual resonant emission and absorption into and from vacuum modes whose frequency equals the transition frequency to available lower-lying atomic states. For identical atoms, one of which is in an excited state, we also discuss the mixing term which depends on the symmetry of the two-atom wave function (these evolve into either the gerade or the ungerade state for close approach), and we include all nonresonant states in our rigorous QED treatment. In order to illustrate the findings, we analyze the fine-structure resolved van der Waals interaction for nD-1S hydrogen interactions with n=8,10,12 and find surprisingly large numerical coefficients.

6 pages; RevTeX

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• Long-Range Interactions for Hydrogen: 6P-1S and 6P-2S
• Atom-field dynamics in curved spacetime
• Two-atom van-der-Waals forces with one atom excited: the identical atoms limit I
• Lateral interatomic dispersion forces
• Resonance oscillations of non-reciprocal long-range van der Waals forces between atoms in electromagnetic fields
• Scattering properties of collective dipolar systems
• Pressure Shifts in High-Precision Hydrogen Spectroscopy: I. Long-Range Atom-Atom and Atom-Molecule Interactions
• Close Examination of the Ground-State Casimir-Polder Interaction: Time-Ordered Versus Covariant Formalism and Radiative Corrections