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Wayne Cheng-Wei Huang and Herman Batelaan test a common view that classical theories such as stochastic electrodynamics cannot produce discrete energy spectra. They find that a classical harmonic oscillator immersed in classical electromagnetic zero-point radiation, excited by a single pulse, shows a quantised excitation spectrum matching the quantum oscillator. Both spectra come from numerically computing the oscillator's total energy after the pulse, the quantum one by solving Schrödinger's equation. The classical zero-point field theory and quantum mechanics agree within the numerical convergence error. Planck's constant enters the classical theory only as the factor that sets the strength of the zero-point field.

Discrete Excitation Spectrum of a Classical Harmonic Oscillator in Zero-Point Radiation