Light-Matter Interaction in Periodic Nanostructures
Prof. Dr. Kurt Busch
( Institut für Theoretische Festkörperphysik, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology)
03.02.2010
Over the past two decades, periodically nanostructured materials have emerged as a promising platform for controlling the propagation of light and light-matter interaction. Owing to the dramatic progress in fabricating high-quality samples from various types of materials, one of the current trends is to move into the direction of active materials with potential for immediate applications and functional elements that can operate in the few-photon regime.
In this talk, I will report on our progress regarding the theoretical descriptions of such systems. In particular, we have recently developed a “bottom-up” approach to thermal emission from photonic crystals that solely relies on photonic bandstructure computations [1]. This allows us to investigate the effects of enhancement effects due to low values of the group velocity and how to control the emission characteristics via judiciously chosen surface terminations. Similar modifications of the radiation dynamics can also be expected for the spontaneous emission of a single emitter embedded in a photonic crystal and I will present our DGTD-based, fully quantitative approach to solving the corresponding Maxwell-Bloch equations [2]. Finally, I will introduce our computational framework for studying few-photon transport properties in low-dimensional systems with embedded two-level systems. Based on this, we have shown how a bound-photon atom state can be excited through multi-photon processes. This interaction-induced radiation trapping is rather robust may be exploited for the realization of quantum logic circuits in a number of systems [3].
[1] C. Schuler, C. Wolff, K. Busch, and M. Florescu, Appl. Phys. Lett. 95, 241103 (2009)
[2] P. Longo, J. Niegemann, and K. Busch, in preparation
[3] P. Longo, P. Schmitteckert, and K. Busch, Phys. Rev. Lett. 104, 023602 (2010)