Self-dressing in classical and quantum electrodynamics

Abstract

A short review is presented of the theory of dressed states in nonrelativistic QED, encompassing fully and partially dressed states in atomic physics. This leads to the concept of the reconstruction of the cloud of virtual photons and of self-dressing. Finally some recent results on the classical counterpart of self-dressing are discussed and a comparison is made with the QED case. Attention is drawn to open problems and future lines of research are briefly outlined.