Quantum dynamics in photonic crystals

TL;DR

This paper introduces a numerically accurate method to analyze the full quantum dynamics of an atom coupled to a gapped continuum light field in photonic crystals, revealing significant deviations from traditional approximations especially in strong coupling regimes.

Contribution

The study presents a new numerical approach for simulating atom-light interactions in photonic crystals, capturing dynamics beyond the rotating wave approximation.

Findings

Atomic population and coherence dynamics differ significantly from RWA predictions.

Strong coupling regime shows pronounced deviations in quantum dynamics.

Experimental conditions for observing these effects are discussed.

Abstract

Employing a recently developed method that is numerically accurate within a model space simulating the real-time dynamics of few-body systems interacting with macroscopic environmental quantum fields, we analyze the full dynamics of an atomic system coupled to a continuum light-field with a gapped spectral density. This is a situation encountered, for example, in the radiation field in a photonic crystal, whose analysis has been so far been confined to limiting cases due to the lack of suitable numerical techniques. We show that both atomic population and coherence dynamics can drastically deviate from the results predicted when using the rotating wave approximation, particularly in the strong coupling regime. Experimental conditions required to observe these corrections are also discussed.