Spatial decoherence near metallic surfaces

We present a first-principles derivation of spatial atomic-sublevel decoherence near dielectric and metallic surfaces. The theory is based on the electromagnetic-field quantization in absorbing dielectric media. We derive an expression for the time-variation of the off-diagonal matrix element of the atomic density matrix for arbitrarily shaped substrates. For planar multilayered substrates we find that for small lateral separations of the atom's possible positions the spatial coherence decreases quadratically with the separation and inversely to the squared atom-surface distance.