Reply to: "Comment on: 'Effects of including the counterrotating term and virtual photons on the eigenfunctions and eigenvalues of a scalar photon collective emission theory' [Phys. Lett. A 372 (2008) 2514]" [Phys. Lett. A 372 (2008) 5732]

We compute the emission amplitude for the collective emission from a sphere of identical atoms in the scalar photon theory for both the cases of the complex kernel (i.e. including virtual photons) and real kernel. We explicitly show that the single mode theory based on the real kernel neglects the effects of the different decay rates and frequency shifts associated with the eigenfunctions belonging to the same angular index but with different radial indices. We show that these effects modify, for k(0)R >> 1, both the time dependence of the emission amplitude and its angular distribution, in clear contradiction to the assertions made by the Comment's authors. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.