Michael Ruggenthaler

Atoms and molecules in cavities, from weak to strong coupling in quantum-electrodynamics (QED) chemistry

Significance Traditionally, quantum chemistry investigates molecular systems assuming that the photon field, which leads to the interaction of charged particles, is well approximated by the Coulomb interaction. On the other hand, quantum optics describe the photon field in detail while approximating the matter systems via few levels. Recent experiments at the interface between these two areas of research have uncovered situations where both the molecular system and the photon field have to be treated in detail. In this work, we show how theoretical approaches have to be adapted to treat such coupled matter–photon problems and which effects can be anticipated. Our quantum electrodynamics density-functional formalism provides the theoretical framework to open a field of research able to deal with emergent properties of matter. In this work, we provide an overview of how well-established concepts in the fields of quantum chemistry and material sciences have to be adapted when the quantum nature of light becomes important in correlated matter–photon problems. We analyze model systems in optical cavities, where the matter–photon interaction is considered from the weak- to the strong-coupling limit and for individual photon modes as well as for the multimode case. We identify fundamental changes in Born–Oppenheimer surfaces, spectroscopic quantities, conical intersections, and efficiency for quantum control. We conclude by applying our recently developed quantum-electrodynamical density-functional theory to spontaneous emission and show how a straightforward approximation accurately describes the correlated electron–photon dynamics. This work paves the way to describe matter–photon interactions from first principles and addresses the emergence of new states of matter in chemistry and material science.

Quantum-electrodynamical density-functional theory: Bridging quantum optics and electronic-structure theory

In this work, we give a comprehensive derivation of an exact and numerically feasible method to perform ab initio calculations of quantum particles interacting with a quantized electromagnetic field. We present a hierarchy of density-functional-type theories that describe the interaction of charged particles with photons and introduce the appropriate Kohn-Sham schemes. We show how the evolution of a system described by quantum electrodynamics in Coulomb gauge is uniquely determined by its initial state and two reduced quantities. These two fundamental observables, the polarization of the Dirac field and the vector potential of the photon field, can be calculated by solving two coupled, nonlinear evolution equations without the need to explicitly determine the (numerically infeasible) many-body wave function of the coupled quantum system. To find reliable approximations to the implicit functionals, we present the appropriate Kohn-Sham construction. In the nonrelativistic limit, this density-functional-type theory of quantum electrodynamics reduces to the densityfunctional reformulation of the Pauli-Fierz Hamiltonian, which is based on the current density of the electrons and the vector potential of the photonfield. By making further approximations, e.g., restricting the allowed modes of the photon field, we derive further density-functional-type theories of coupled matter-photon systems for the corresponding approximate Hamiltonians. In the limit of only two sites and one mode we deduce the appropriate effective theory for the two-site Hubbard model coupled to one photonic mode. This model system is used to illustrate the basic ideas of a density-functional reformulation in great detail and we present the exact Kohn-Sham potentials for our coupled matter-photon model system.

Existence, uniqueness, and construction of the density-potential mapping in time-dependent density-functional theory

In this work we review the mapping from densities to potentials in quantum mechanics, which is the basic building block of time-dependent density-functional theory and the Kohn-Sham construction. We first present detailed conditions such that a mapping from potentials to densities is defined by solving the time-dependent Schrödinger equation. We specifically discuss intricacies connected with the unboundedness of the Hamiltonian and derive the local-force equation. This equation is then used to set up an iterative sequence that determines a potential that generates a specified density via time propagation of an initial state. This fixed-point procedure needs the invertibility of a certain Sturm-Liouville problem, which we discuss for different situations. Based on these considerations we then present a discussion of the famous Runge-Gross theorem which provides a density-potential mapping for time-analytic potentials. Further we give conditions such that the general fixed-point approach is well-defined and converges under certain assumptions. Then the application of such a fixed-point procedure to lattice Hamiltonians is discussed and the numerical realization of the density-potential mapping is shown. We conclude by presenting an extension of the density-potential mapping to include vector-potentials and photons.

Kohn–Sham approach to quantum electrodynamical density-functional theory: Exact time-dependent effective potentials in real space

Significance Density-functional theory (DFT) is a well-established method to study many-electron systems. Over the past decades advanced algorithms have been designed that allow even large systems to be solved computationally very efficiently. Only recently, DFT has been generalized to correctly incorporate the quantum nature of light, which becomes important, e.g., in cavity quantum electrodynamics (QED). In general, the accuracy in density-functional theory depends crucially on the capability to construct good approximations that reflect the features of the exact effective potential for the Kohn–Sham system. In this work, we introduce a fixed-point scheme to construct these exact effective potentials for a cavity QED system and demonstrate their features for the ground-state and time-dependent situations. The density-functional approach to quantum electrodynamics extends traditional density-functional theory and opens the possibility to describe electron–photon interactions in terms of effective Kohn–Sham potentials. In this work, we numerically construct the exact electron–photon Kohn–Sham potentials for a prototype system that consists of a trapped electron coupled to a quantized electromagnetic mode in an optical high-Q cavity. Although the effective current that acts on the photons is known explicitly, the exact effective potential that describes the forces exerted by the photons on the electrons is obtained from a fixed-point inversion scheme. This procedure allows us to uncover important beyond-mean-field features of the effective potential that mark the breakdown of classical light–matter interactions. We observe peak and step structures in the effective potentials, which can be attributed solely to the quantum nature of light; i.e., they are real-space signatures of the photons. Our findings show how the ubiquitous dipole interaction with a classical electromagnetic field has to be modified in real space to take the quantum nature of the electromagnetic field fully into account.

Cavity Born–Oppenheimer Approximation for Correlated Electron–Nuclear-Photon Systems

In this work, we illustrate the recently introduced concept of the cavity Born–Oppenheimer approximation [Flick et al. PNAS2017, 10.1073/pnas.1615509114] for correlated electron–nuclear-photon problems in detail. We demonstrate how an expansion in terms of conditional electronic and photon-nuclear wave functions accurately describes eigenstates of strongly correlated light-matter systems. For a GaAs quantum ring model in resonance with a photon mode we highlight how the ground-state electronic potential-energy surface changes the usual harmonic potential of the free photon mode to a dressed mode with a double-well structure. This change is accompanied by a splitting of the electronic ground-state density. For a model where the photon mode is in resonance with a vibrational transition, we observe in the excited-state electronic potential-energy surface a splitting from a single minimum to a double minimum. Furthermore, for a time-dependent setup, we show how the dynamics in correlated light-matter systems can be understood in terms of population transfer between potential energy surfaces. This work at the interface of quantum chemistry and quantum optics paves the way for the full ab initio description of matter-photon systems.

Density-potential mappings in quantum dynamics

In a recent paper [Europhys. Lett. 95, 13001 (2011)] the question of whether the density of a time-dependent quantum system determines its external potential was reformulated as a fixed-point problem. This idea was used to generalize the existence and uniqueness theorems underlying time-dependent density-functional theory. In this work we extend this proof to allow for more general norms and provide a numerical implementation of the fixed-point iteration scheme. We focus on the one-dimensional case because it allows for a more in-depth analysis using singular Sturm-Liouville theory and at the same time provides an easy visualization of the numerical applications in space and time. We give an explicit relation between the boundary conditions on the density and the convergence properties of the fixed-point procedure via the spectral properties of the associated Sturm-Liouville operator. We show precisely under which conditions discrete and continuous spectra arise and give explicit examples. These conditions are then used to show that, in the most physically relevant cases, the fixed-point procedure converges. This is further demonstrated with an example.

Time-dependent Kohn-Sham approach to quantum electrodynamics

We prove a generalization of the van Leeuwen theorem toward quantum electrodynamics, providing the formal foundations of a time-dependent Kohn-Sham construction for coupled quantized matter and electromagnetic fields. We circumvent the symmetry-causality problems associated with the action-functional approach to Kohn-Sham systems. We show that the effective external four-potential and four-current of the Kohn-Sham system are uniquely defined and that the effective four-current takes a very simple form. Further we rederive the Runge-Gross theorem for quantum electrodynamics.

Ab-initio Optimized Effective Potentials for Real Molecules in Optical Cavities: Photon Contributions to the Molecular Ground state

We introduce a simple scheme to efficiently compute photon exchange-correlation contributions due to the coupling to transversal photons as formulated in the newly developed quantum-electrodynamical density-functional theory (QEDFT).1−5 Our construction employs the optimized-effective potential (OEP) approach by means of the Sternheimer equation to avoid the explicit calculation of unoccupied states. We demonstrate the efficiency of the scheme by applying it to an exactly solvable GaAs quantum ring model system, a single azulene molecule, and chains of sodium dimers, all located in optical cavities and described in full real space. While the first example is a two-dimensional system and allows to benchmark the employed approximations, the latter two examples demonstrate that the correlated electron-photon interaction appreciably distorts the ground-state electronic structure of a real molecule. By using this scheme, we not only construct typical electronic observables, such as the electronic ground-state density, but also illustrate how photon observables, such as the photon number, and mixed electron-photon observables, for example, electron–photon correlation functions, become accessible in a density-functional theory (DFT) framework. This work constitutes the first three-dimensional ab initio calculation within the new QEDFT formalism and thus opens up a new computational route for the ab initio study of correlated electron–photon systems in quantum cavities.

Functional differentiability in time-dependent quantum mechanics

In this work, we investigate the functional differentiability of the time-dependent many-body wave function and of derived quantities with respect to time-dependent potentials. For properly chosen Banach spaces of potentials and wave functions, Fréchet differentiability is proven. From this follows an estimate for the difference of two solutions to the time-dependent Schrödinger equation that evolve under the influence of different potentials. Such results can be applied directly to the one-particle density and to bounded operators, and present a rigorous formulation of non-equilibrium linear-response theory where the usual Lehmann representation of the linear-response kernel is not valid. Further, the Fréchet differentiability of the wave function provides a new route towards proving basic properties of time-dependent density-functional theory.

Exact functionals for correlated electron–photon systems

For certain correlated electron-photon systems we construct the exact density-to-potential maps, which are the basic ingredients of a density-functional reformulation of coupled matter-photon problems. We do so for numerically exactly solvable models consisting of up to four fermionic sites coupled to a single photon mode. We show that the recently introduced concept of the intra-system steepening (T.Dimitrov et al., 18, 083004 NJP (2016)) can be generalized to coupled fermion-boson systems and that the intra-system steepening indicates strong exchange-correlation (xc) effects due to the coupling between electrons and photons. The reliability of the mean-field approximation to the electron-photon interaction is investigated and its failure in the strong coupling regime analyzed. We highlight how the intra-system steepening of the exact density-to-potential maps becomes apparent also in observables such as the photon number or the polarizability of the electronic subsystem. We finally show that a change in functional variables can make these observables behave more smoothly and exemplify that the density-to-potential maps can give us physical insights into the behavior of coupled electron-photon systems by identifying a very large polarizability due to ultra-strong electron-photon coupling.