The complete treatment of the time evolution in the case of a discretized atom-field interaction model

Full text: The dynamics of a discretized atom-field interaction model with a physically relevant form factor is analyzed. It is shown that after some short time interval only a small fraction of eigenvalues and eigenstates (belonging to the close vicinity of the excited atomic state energy E=ω0/2) contributes to the nondecay probability amplitudes in the long-time regime, whereas the contribution of all other eigenstates and eigenvalues is negligible. Nevertheless, to describe correctly the non-Markovian dynamics in the short-time regime the contribution of all eigenstates and eigenvalues must be taken into account. (author)