  Spontaneous emission by an excited fermionic atom can be suppressed due to
the Pauli exclusion principle if the relevant final states after the decay are
already occupied by identical atoms in the ground state. Here we discuss a
setup where a single atom is prepared in the first excited state on a single
site of an optical lattice under conditions of very tight trapping. We
investigate these phenomena in the context of two experimental realizations:
(1) with alkali atoms, where the decay rate of the excited state is large and
(2) with alkaline earth-like atoms, where the decay rate from metastable states
can be tuned in experiments. This phenomenon has potential applications towards
reservoir engineering and dissipative many-body state preparation in an optical
lattice.
