Phase-space analysis of bosonic spontaneous emission

Abstract

We present phase-space techniques for the modelling of spontaneous emission in two-level bosonic atoms. The positive-P representation is shown to give a full and complete description and can be further developed to give exact treatments of the interaction of degenerate bosons with the electromagnetic field in a given experimental situation. The Wigner representation, even when truncated at second order, is shown to need a doubling of the phase-space to allow for a positive-definite diffusion matrix in the appropriate Fokker-Planck equation and still fails to agree with the full quantum results of the positive-P representation. We show that quantum statistics and correlations between the ground and excited states affect the dynamics of the emission process, so that it is in general non-exponential.