Abstract. We give a theoretical description of the spectrally resolved intensity correlations of an electromagnetic field, in analogy with the definition of the physical time-dependent spectrum. The results are applied to evaluate the time correlations between the three lines in the spectrum of resonance fluorescence of a two-level atom. We include the possibility of a finite bandwidth of the incident radiation, and we allow for collisions with perturber atoms. Photons in the central Rayleigh line are emitted in a fully random fashion, without any correlation with previous or subsequent emissions. Two photons from the same sideband display antibunching in time, whereas two photons from opposite sidebands tend to bunch with a strong asymmetry in time. The effect of collisions and of a finite bandwidth is to diminish this asymmetry.

Radiation emitted by an electric dipole consists of traveling and evanescent plane waves. Usually, only the traveling waves are observable by a measurement in the far field, since the evanescent waves die out over a length of approximately a wavelength from the source. We show that when the radiation is passed through an interface with a medium with an index of refraction larger than the index of refraction of the embedding medium of the dipole, a portion of the evanescent waves are converted into traveling waves, and they become observable in the far field. The same conclusion holds when the waves pass through a layer of finite thickness. Waves that are transmitted under an angle larger than the so-called anti-critical angle theta (1) ac are shown to originate in evanescent dipole waves. In this fashion, part of the evanescent spectrum of the radiation becomes amenable to observation in the far field. We also show that in many situations the power in the far field coming from evanescent waves greatly exceeds the power originating in traveling waves.

The field lines of the Poynting vector for light emitted by a dipole with a rotating dipole moment show a vortex pattern near the location of the dipole. In the far field, each field line approaches a straight line, but this line does not appear to come exactly from the location of the dipole. As a result, the image of the dipole in its plane of rotation seems displaced. Secondly, the image in the far field is displaced as compared with the image of a source for which the field lines run radially outward. It turns out that both image displacements are the same. The displacements are of subwavelength scale, and they depend on the angles of observation. The maximum displacement occurs for observation in the plane of rotation and equals lambda/pi, where lambda is the wavelength of the light.

No abstract

We incorporate in the theory of collisional redistribution of resonance radiation the effect of a finite bandwidth of the intense incident radiation. The phase of the radiation is treated as a process with independent increments, which contains the phase-diffusion model as a special case. These phase fluctuations give rise to effective decay operators affecting the evolution of the density matrix and the regression of the correlation function. For a two-level atom suffering binary collisions the combined effect of collisions and phase fluctuations on the fluorescence spectrum is evaluated in several limiting cases of practical interest.