Spontaneous Photon Emission in Cavities

We investigate spontaneous photon emission processes of two-level atoms in parabolic and ellipsoidal cavities thereby taking into account the full multimode scenario. In particular, we calculate the excitation probabilities of the atoms and the energy density of the resulting few-photon electromagnetic radiation field by using semiclassical methods for the description of the multimode scenario. Based on this approach photon path representations are developed for relevant transition probability amplitudes which are valid in the optical frequency regime where the dipole and the rotating-wave approximations apply. Comparisons with numerical results demonstrate the quality of these semiclassical results even in cases in which the wave length of a spontaneously emitted photon becomes comparable or even larger than characteristic length scales of the cavity. This is the dynamical regime in which diffraction effects become important so that geometric optical considerations are typically not applicable.