We consider the effect of lateral shift of the "beams" resulting from the atom emissions on spontaneous decay of an excited atom embedded in a planar cavity with perfect conducting cladding. It is found that the spontaneous decay could be enhanced or suppressed owing to the positive and negative lateral shift at the interfaces of the cavity mirror. Compared with the emission between two perfect conducting plates, the surface guided modes could exist and for very thin planar cavity, the density of surface guided modes may be obviously larger tha...
