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Spontaneous Emission from Electronic Metastable Resonance States
Amir Sivan1,2, Milan Šindelka3,4, Meir Orenstein1,2
1Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Andrew and Erna Viterbi Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Haifa 32000, Israel.
Physical Review Letters
|October 31, 2025
Summary
Calculating spontaneous emission decay rates from metastable resonance states requires considering all continuum transitions. Complex-scaling transformations make this computationally feasible, offering a new method for studying these states.
Area of Science:
- Quantum mechanics
- Atomic, molecular, and optical physics
- Computational physics
Background:
- Metastable resonance states have finite lifetimes and are embedded in the continuum.
- Calculating spontaneous emission decay rates from these states is computationally challenging.
- Standard quantum mechanical formalisms struggle with these calculations.
Purpose of the Study:
- To demonstrate a new method for calculating spontaneous emission decay rates from metastable resonance states.
- To show that transitions to all continuum states must be considered.
- To adapt methods for bound states to resonance states.
Main Methods:
- Utilizing complex-scaling transformations.
- Calculating complex poles of the scattering matrix.
- Applying methods originally designed for excited bound states.
- Illustrating with a double-barrier potential model.
Main Results:
- Spontaneous emission decay rate calculations must include transitions to all continuum states, not just lower ones.
- Complex-scaling transformations enable feasible computation of these rates.
- The method shows rapid numerical convergence.
Conclusions:
- A computationally feasible method for calculating spontaneous emission decay rates from metastable resonance states is presented.
- This approach overcomes limitations of standard quantum mechanical formalisms.
- It opens new avenues for studying spontaneous emission in complex systems, including many-electron systems.
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