Additivity of R\"ontgen term and recoil-induced correction to spontaneous emission rate
Abstract
For a moving atom, the spontaneous emission rate is modified due to the contributions from two factors, the R\"ontgen interaction term and the recoil effect induced by the emitted photon. Here we investigate the emission rate of a uniformly moving atom near a perfectly conducting plate and obtain the corrections induced by these two factors. We find that the corrections individually induced by the R\"ontgen term and the recoil effect can be simply added and result in the total correction to the decay rate. Moreover, it is shown that the R\"ontgen term gives positive correction, while the recoil effect induces negative correction. Our work paves the way towards the future studies of the light-matter interaction for the moving particle in quantum optics.