Effects of local fields on spontaneous emission in dielectric media

The local-field renormalization of the spontaneous emission rate in a dielectric is explicitly obtained from a fully microscopic quantum-electrodynamical, many-body derivation of Langevin-Bloch operator equations for two-level atoms embedded in an absorptive and dispersive, linear dielectric host. We find that the dielectric local-field enhancement of the spontaneous emission rate is smaller than indicated by previous studies.