Decay of nth excitation in Hormonic Oscillator

Harmonic oscillator is one of the fundamental system that every student of physics is required to work in both classical and quantum worlds. The understanding of this systems helps in resolving many problems eg propagation of sound in air, lattice vibration of crystals, interaction of radiation with matter, shell closures in nuclear system etc. It is perhaps ironic, then, how challenging it is to actually prepare a pure harmonic oscillator state with a well-defined excitation number n. Now, using different methods, two groups—Michel Brune and colleagues at the Laboratoire Kastler Brossel of the CRNS and Collège de France, both in Paris, and Haohua Wang and colleagues at the University of California in Santa Barbara (UCSB)—have created these nonclassical states of the harmonic oscillator and performed a detailed study of how they decay in time. The experiments, reported in Phys. Rev. Lett. 101, 240401 (2008) – Published December 08, 2008, demonstrate that the lifetime of a Fock state with excitation number n scales as 1/n, as predicted by theory