Quantum dynamics in photonic crystals

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 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. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevA.87.013428