  Light is known to exert radiation pressure on any surface it is incident
upon, via the transfer of momentum from the light to the surface. In general,
this force is assumed to be pushing or repulsive in nature. In this paper, we
present a complete quantum treatment of radiation pressure. We show that the
interaction of an atom with light can lead to both repulsive and attractive
forces due to the absorption and emission of photons, respectively. An atom
prepared in the excited state initially will experience a pulling force when
interacting with light. On the other hand, if the atom is prepared in the
ground state then the force will be repulsive while having the same magnitude
as in the earlier case. Therefore, for an ensemble of atoms, the direction of
the net force will be decided by the excited and ground state populations. In
the semi-classical treatment of light-matter interaction, the absorption and
emission processes have the same probability. Therefore the magnitudes of the
force in the two processes turn out to be the same. We obtain the effective
emission profile for an excited atom interacting with a quantum electromagnetic
field, and show that in the quantum treatment, despite these probabilities
being different, the magnitudes of the two statistical forces remain the same.
This can be explained by noting that the extra contribution in the emission
process is due to the interaction of the atom with the vacuum modes of the
electromagnetic field, which results in a symmetric emission profile,
contributing to a net zero force on the atoms in an ensemble. We further
identify the set of states of electromagnetic field which give rise to non-zero
momentum transfer to the atom.
