https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2018-90177-6
Regular Article
Light-matter interactions via the exact factorization approach★
1
Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter and Center for Free-Electron Laser Science and Department of Physics,
Luruper Chaussee 149,
22761
Hamburg, Germany
2
Department of Physics and Astronomy, Hunter College of the City University of New York,
695 Park Avenue,
New York
10065, USA
3
The Physics Program and the Chemistry Program of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York,
New York
10065, USA
4
Center for Computational Quantum Physics, Flatiron Institute,
162 5th Avenue,
New York,
NY
10010, USA
a e-mail: Norah-Magdalena.Hoffmann@mpsd.mpg.de
b e-mail: heiko.appel@mpsd.mpg.de
c e-mail: angel.rubio@mpsd.mpg.de
d e-mail: nmaitra@hunter.cuny.ed
Received:
16
March
2018
Received in final form:
1
June
2018
Published online: 6
August
2018
The exact factorization approach, originally developed for electron-nuclear dynamics, is extended to light-matter interactions within the dipole approximation. This allows for a Schrödinger equation for the photonic wavefunction, in which the potential contains exactly the effects on the photon field of its coupling to matter. We illustrate the formalism and potential for a two-level system representing the matter, coupled to an infinite number of photon modes in the Wigner-Weisskopf approximation, as well as to a single mode with various coupling strengths. Significant differences are found with the potential used in conventional approaches, especially for strong couplings. We discuss how our exact factorization approach for light-matter interactions can be used as a guideline to develop semiclassical trajectory methods for efficient simulations of light-matter dynamics.
© The Author(s) 2018. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
