2014/11/11 by U. D. Jentschura, Ulrich D. Jentschura, Grzegorz Łach +4 · 32 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics #Atom (system on chip) #Atomic physics #Black-body radiation #Classical mechanics #Condensed matter physics #Dissipative system #Molecule #Photon #Physics #Polarizability #Quantum #Quantum Electrodynamics and Casimir Effect #Quantum Mechanics and Applications #Quantum electrodynamics #Quantum mechanics #Radiation #Van der Waals radius #Van der Waals strain #quant-ph #van der Waals force
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.114.043001
published in Physical Review Letters 114(4), 043001 (American Physical Society) · 5 pages; RevTeX
arxiv created 2014/11/11 · openalex publication_date 2015/01/27 · arxiv updated 2015/01/28 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
Phenomenologically important quantum dissipative processes include blackbody friction (an atom absorbs counterpropagating blueshifted photons and spontaneously emits them in all directions, losing kinetic energy) and noncontact van der Waals friction (in the vicinity of a dielectric surface, the mirror charges of the constituent particles inside the surface experience drag, slowing the atom). The theoretical predictions for these processes are modified upon a rigorous quantum electrodynamic treatment, which shows that the one-loop "correction" yields the dominant contribution to the off-resonant, gauge-invariant, imaginary part of the atom's polarizability at room temperature, for typical atom-surface interactions. The tree-level contribution to the polarizability dominates at high temperature.