On the absence of excited eigenstates of atoms in QED (Q842435)

Physical intuition tells us that exited eigenstates of atoms or molecules disappear from the spectrum when the coupling to the quantized radiation field is taken into account. In short, exited states decay by emisssion of one or two photons. Arguments found in the textbooks rely entirely on perturbation theory. There is a huge amount of rigorous literature on this subject. Previous methods of analyzing the spectrum are based on complex spectral deformation, on Mourre's theory or on operator renormalization group analysis, either with or without infrared regularization. Very often the analysis does not include dipole transitions, i.e.\ the simultaneous emission of two photons. The physical system studied in the present paper consists of a nonrelativistic hydrogen atom where the electron interacts with the transverse modes of the quantized electromagnetic vector potential. Ultraviolet divergencies are avoided by introducing a smooth cutoff function. However, an infrared cutoff is not required. The investigation and its results (absence of exited eigenstates) applies to the energy range between the groundstate and some small neighbourhood of the ionization threshold.