Mourre Estimate and Spectral Theory for the Standard Model of Non-Relativistic QED

For a model of atoms and molecules made from static nuclei and non-relativistic electrons coupled to the quantized radiation field (the standard model of non-relativistic QED), we prove a Mourre estimate and a limiting absorption principle in a neighborhood of the ground state energy. As corollaries we derive local decay estimates for the photon dynamics, and we prove absence of (excited) eigenvalues and absolute continuity of the energy spectrum near the ground state energy, a region of the spectrum not understood in previous investigations. The conjugate operator in our Mourre estimate is the second quantized generator of dilatations on Fock space.