Bound states and photon emission in non-Hermitian nanophotonics

TL;DR

This paper develops a comprehensive non-Hermitian framework to analyze bound states and photon emission in dissipative nanophotonic lattices, revealing novel phenomena in quantum emitter dynamics.

Contribution

It introduces a general non-Hermitian formalism for structured nanophotonic systems with dissipation, extending previous single-emitter results to multiple emitters and higher dimensions.

Findings

Single-emitter non-Hermitian systems show anomalous behaviors.

Multiple emitters and higher-dimensional systems exhibit complex phenomena.

The framework uncovers new non-Hermitian effects in dissipative nanophotonics.

Abstract

We establish a general framework for studying the bound states and the photon-emission dynamics of quantum emitters coupled to structured nanophotonic lattices with engineered dissipation (loss). In the single-excitation sector, the system can be described exactly by a non-Hermitian formalism. We have pointed out in the accompanying letter [Gong \emph{et al}., arXiv:2205.05479] that a single emitter coupled to a one-dimensional non-Hermitian lattice may already exhibit anomalous behaviors without Hermitian counterparts. Here we provide further detail on these observations. We also present several additional examples on the cases with multiple quantum emitters or in higher dimensions. Our work unveils the tip of the iceberg of the rich non-Hermitian phenomena in dissipative nanophotonic systems.