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Abstract

We discuss various aspects of the incoherent spontaneous emission in atomic few-level systems arising from the coupling of the atom to the surrounding vacuum. First, we consider systems where the decoherence due to spontaneous emission acts as a limiting factor. Here, we combine collective effects in larger samples of atoms with control mechanisms known from single-atom schemes, or modifiy the system dynamics by externally inducing multiphoton quantum interference effects. In the second part, we discuss ground-state laser cooling of trapped atoms and ions. Here, the momentum transfer in the spontaneous emission events is required to cool the particles, but needs to be controlled in order to achieve a low cooling limit. In our scheme, we make use of double electromagnetically induced transparency in order to design the absorption spectrum of the trapped particle. In the final part, we show that the incoherent part of the resonance fluorescence spectrum of a two-level system may serve as an interesting candidate for high-precision spectroscopy. For this, we discuss relativistic and radiative corrections to the resonance fluorescence spectra of laser-driven few-level systems.