For emitters in a medium, different macroscopic or microscopic theoreticalmodels predict substantially different dependencies of the spontaneous emissionlifetime on refractive index. Various measurements have been carried out onEu$^{3+}$, Ce$^{3+}$ and Nd$^{3+}$ ions, and quantum dots in differentsurrounding medial. The dependence of the spontaneous emission rates onrefractive index has been interpreted with different models. By closelyexamining some of the experimental results, we notice that some interpretationsare based on implicit assumptions which are hard to justify, and somemeasurements contain too big uncertainties to discriminate among differentmodels. In this work we reanalyse the avilable measured results and give aconsistent interpretation.
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