|
|On 06/09/2013 10:25 PM, Bernard Cleyet wrote:
|
|> At zero there is energy available to emit radiation (E-M).
|
|Hah! That's a good question. I remember asking myself that question once
|upon a time. It took me a year to figure out the answer.
|
|> Zero point motion is a fiction?
|
|That's not the answer.
|
|Consider a hydrogen atom in its ground state. The size of the atom *is* the
|zero-point motion of the electron.
|If there were no zero point motion, there would be no atoms.
|
|So, do you want the conventional answer or my answer?
|
| *) The conventional answer is that the electron in
| the ground state cannot radiate. If you do the math
| using the usual energy-eigenstate photon-number
| basis, you can more-or-less convince yourself that
| this is true. Note that photon number is second
| order in the ladder operators "a" and "a†".
|
The ground state of the atom is spherically symmetric and presumably has zero dipole moment. I recall showing that EM radiation requires a time varying dipole moment (non-zero 2nd time derivative); which implies that a spherically symmetric charge distribution can not radiate.