Anisotropic vacuum-induced interference in decay channels

Abstract

We demonstrate how the anisotropy of the vacuum of the electromagnetic field can lead to quantum interferences among the decay channels of close lying states. Our key result is that interferences are given by the scalar formed from the antinormally ordered electric field correlation tensor for the anisotropic vacuum and the dipole matrix elements for the two transitions. We present results for emission between two conducting plates as well as for a two photon process involving fluorescence produced under coherent cw excitation.