When and multiply radiation energy density per unit angular frequency, they differ by a factor from coefficients multiplying the density per ordinary frequency. For nondegenerate levels, Boltzmann distribution populations and thermal equilibrium give and the free-space ratio in the title. Specifically while is unchanged. Polarization restrictions and level degeneracy must be specified separately.
Define and use radiation energy density per unit angular frequency, excluding the zero-point contribution. The Angular-frequency Einstein coefficients give rates per atom: for absorption, for stimulated emission, and for spontaneous emission. Stimulated emission adds a photon to the stimulating mode; spontaneous emission persists with no incident photons.
Figure 1.
Absorption, stimulated emission and spontaneous emission between two nondegenerate levels
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In thermal equilibrium the Boltzmann distribution gives . Balancing up and down rates yields
Matching the Planck law for every temperature fixes
No degeneracy factor is needed for these nondegenerate levels.[ref]
For plates of large area and spacing , the surviving low-frequency transverse electromagnetic mode has one polarization, , and in-plane wavevector. Periodic in-plane counting gives
Multiplying this single-polarization two-dimensional photon density of states by and the Bose-Einstein distribution produces the thermal radiation between parallel conducting plates:
The same rate balance therefore gives
These coefficients refer to the radiation polarization in their respective environments: isotropic free-space must not automatically be equated to the coefficient for a specified -polarized field.
For hydrogen, take the quantization axis along , neglect spin-orbit coupling, and assume perfect plates, a wide in-plane region and an unmodified atomic wavefunction: , with negligible surface-induced mixing or shifts. The electric-dipole selection rules for hydrogen require ; the allowed field has . Hence the polarization-selective spontaneous emission between conducting plates gives
The thin-cavity enhancement of a normal electric dipole applies: the dipole points along and couples to the enhanced mode density. For , the transition dipoles lie in the – plane and couple to none of these low-frequency modes: the electric-dipole decay rate is zero in the ideal model, so this channel's lifetime is infinite. Real finite, imperfect plates and additional decay or mixing channels limit the lifetime. The order-one orientation factor for the allowed transition does not change the requested lifetime scaling.
Here is the cosmological scale factor, is cosmic time and is the Hubble parameter. With a length, labels positively curved, flat and negatively curved spatial sections. This is unrelated to Question 1's specific orbital energy. The density is mass-equivalent energy density: has energy-per-volume units. In the displayed Friedmann equation has units ; the geometric cosmological constant is . For a separately conserved fluid of constant equation of state , the cosmological perfect-fluid continuity equation gives , so : zero for pressureless matter and one for radiation. With several fluids, sum their densities in the expansion equation and evolve each separately.
Setting cosmological spatial curvature and the cosmological constant to zero gives the mass-equivalent cosmological critical density,
Its energy-density version is ; keeping this distinction is necessary when dividing a radiation energy density by below.
In an Einstein-de Sitter universe, integrates to and . With ,
Here are the two epoch redshifts relative to today. This is elapsed cosmic time, not comoving distance divided by .
For collisionless preservation of a Planck spectrum, use frequency redshift as well as photon-number conservation. Let , so a frequency bin now corresponds to and initially. Collisionless propagation conserves photon number in the corresponding comoving bin:
For an initial blackbody spectrum, insert its Planck distribution to obtain
The factors from the numerator cancel the spectral dilution factor, while the exponent changes only the temperature. Integrating gives photon number density proportional to and radiation energy density proportional to . Conservation of total photon number alone would not guarantee a blackbody spectrum shape; the frequency-bin mapping and absence of injection or spectral redistribution are essential.
For the numerical density comparisons, the supplied Hubble constant is . Taking and gives
The radiation specified here is cosmic microwave background photons only. Adding a relic neutrino density would change the photon-only matter-radiation equality result. The rounded present matter and vacuum fractions sum to one without this small photon contribution; the requested pairwise density comparisons do not require silently renormalizing them.
For the final unlabelled flight-time request, insert the case-(c) value into the stipulated Einstein-de Sitter formula:
The two model ages are approximately and years. This uses exactly the instructed matter-only model with the same . It is not an exact age difference in the matter-plus-vacuum cosmology; a high-redshift matter-era normalization using would be a different approximation.