Ionisation by quantised electromagnetic fields: The photoelectric effect

Abstract

In this paper we explain the photoelectric effect in a variant of the standard model of non relativistic quantum electrodynamics, which is in some aspects more closely related to the physical picture, than the one studied in [BKZ]: Now we can apply our results to an electron with more than one bound state and to a larger class of electron-photon interactions. We will specify a situation, where ionisation probability in second order is a weighted sum of single photon terms. Furthermore we will see, that Einstein's equality \[E_{kin}=h\nu-\bigtriangleup E>0\] for the maximal kinetic energy $E_{kin}$ of the electron, energy $h\nu$ of the photon and ionisation gap $\bigtriangleup E$ is the crucial condition for these single photon terms to be nonzero.