Dephasing in an atom

When an atom in vacuum is near a surface of a dielectric the energy of a fluctuating electromagnetic field depends on a distance between them resulting, as known, in the force called van der Waals one. Besides this fluctuation phenomenon there is one associated with formation of a mean electric field which is equivalent to an order parameter. In this case atomic electrons are localized within atomic distances close to the atom and the total ground state energy is larger, compared to the bare atom, due to a polarization of the dielectric and a creation of a mean electric field locally distributed in the dielectric. The phenomenon strongly differs from the usual ferroelectricity and has a pure quantum origin connected with a violation of the interference due to dephasing of fluctuating electron states in the atom

The Euclidean resonance and quantum tunneling

The extremely small probability of tunneling through an almost classical potential barrier may become not small under the action of the specially adapted non-stationary signal which selects the certain particle energy E_R. For particle energies close to this value, the tunneling rate is not small during a finite interval of time and has a very sharp peak at the energy E_R. After entering inside the barrier, the particle emits electromagnetic quanta and exits the barrier with a lower energy. The signal amplitude can be much less compared to the field of the static barrier. This phenomenon can be called the Euclidean resonance since the under-barrier motion occurs in imaginary time. The resonance may stimulate chemical and biochemical reactions in a selective way by adapting the signal to a certain particular chemical bond. The resonance may be used in search of the soft alpha-decay for which a conventional observation is impossible due to an extremely small decay rate.Comment: 21 pages and 10 figure