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arXiv:2609.18327

Quantum electrodynamics of equilibrium systems: A rigorous Maxwell-regularized functional-theoretic formulation

Markus Penz, Christian Jöns, Michael Ruggenthaler, Angel Rubio

cond-mat.mtrl-sciphysics.chem-phquant-phSubmitted Sep 16, 2026• Announced Sep 17, 2026
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Abstract

A framework for quantum electrodynamics of equilibrium systems is proposed that takes the Maxwell equations as foundational and links them to the structure of density-functional theory for the quantum system. By switching from purely internal observables like the one-particle density to combined internal and external quantities, the external sources and their energy are taken into account. A fully regularized functional theory emerges that avoids the usual representability problems. With the Kohn-Sham construction that links to an auxiliary uncoupled system, the ultra-violet cutoff can be removed and one arrives at a fully renormalized and non-perturbative light-matter description. Regularized forms of density-functional theory with and without magnetic fields appear as boundary cases, while the emergent physical picture reproduces the macroscopic Maxwell equations.

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A framework for quantum electrodynamics of equilibrium systems is proposed that takes the Maxwell equations as foundational and links them to the structure of density-functional theory for the quantum system. By switching from purely internal observables like the one-particle density to combined internal and external quantities, the external sources and their energy are taken into account. A fully regularized functional theory emerges that avoids the usual representability problems. With the Kohn-Sham construction that links to an auxiliary uncoupled system, the ultra-violet cutoff can be removed and one arrives at a fully renormalized and non-perturbative light-matter description. Regularized forms of density-functional theory with and without magnetic fields appear as boundary cases, while the emergent physical picture reproduces the macroscopic Maxwell equations.
Providing sufficient accuracy at low-computational cost, not surprisingly, density-functional theory ( DFT ) is a standard tool in theoretical material science. Similarly, quantum-electrodynamical density-functional theory ( QEDFT ) provides a promising route to describe experiments at the interface of quantum optics and quantum chemistry. Formally, in the Kohn-Sham ( KS ) formulation of DFT and QEDFT the exact many-particle Schrödinger equation is replaced by a set of coupled non-linear one-particle differential equations. The electron-electron, the electron-ion and the electron-photon interactions of the interacting system are mimicked by their corresponding effective KS potential with an, in principle unknown exchange-correlation ( xc ) term. In practice, DFT and QEDFT require approximations for this xc potential. The quality of which fully determines how much the DFT and QEDFT observables deviate from the exact ones. Understanding the shortcomings and improving the quality of approximate functionals makes the study of the exact functional of model systems indispensable. Here, we employ exact diagonalization for the Hamiltonian of different types of real-space lattice models in one spatial dimension to access the ground-state wave function, and thus to explicitly construct the exact functionals of DFT and QEDFT . To study the functional behavior of purely electronic systems, we consider two singlet-state electrons moving in an external potential with two connected atomic wells of variable depth and distance. To study coupled electron-photon systems, we consider the Rabi Hamiltonian with variable electron-photon coupling strength. By varying the model parameters, we systematically construct the functionals for systems from weak to strong coupling between the building blocks of the global system. Using the concept of the effective density-to- potential map, we discuss the intrasystem steepening which is an exact condition on the xc functional that captures the static correlation present in the system and carve out how it relates to the well-known intersystem derivative discontinuity. We further construct arbitrary observables as functionals of the internal variables which are directly affected by such features of the effective density-to-potential map. By constructing the reduced dipole map in the four-particle case of coupled electron-photon system, we show that the density-to-potential map helps to identify and understand recently discovered physical effects in the field of strongly coupled electron-photon systems. This work provides a contribution to the development of approximate function- als required in practical density-functional calculations of arbitrary experimentally accessible observables. Both the intrasystem steepening and the intersystem derivative discontinuity play a crucial role for systems with highly-localized electrons. Including both features in approximate functionals will improve the accu- racy of DFT evaluation of observables for such systems. Those results provide novel insight into the properties of the exact xc potentials in QEDFT . This work opens a new route to construct new functionals using coarse-grained or embed- ding approaches within the general and exact frameworks of DFT and QEDFT.
This manuscript establishes the absolute operator-theoretic closure of quantum electricity. It formally defines quantum electricity strictly as the gauge-covariant conserved charge transport generated by a self-adjoint matter Hamiltonian under electromagnetic minimal coupling, rather than treating it as a supplementary physical ontology. The paper rigorously derives the exact one-particle current, its operator-valued local density, its Heisenberg continuity law, and its variational identity as the functional derivative of the Hamiltonian with respect to the vector potential. The framework is then systematically extended to spin-1/2 Pauli matter—proving the exact decomposition of the conserved current into distinct transport and divergence-free magnetization sectors—and to second quantization, establishing the many-body continuity law. Furthermore, the manuscript demonstrates that classical electrical source fields emerge exactly as the macroscopic expectation values of the quantum current operators. This provides the rigorous source-side completion for Maxwell field evolution. The theory is also generalized to relativistic quantum electrodynamics (identifying the current as the Noether current of local U(1) gauge invariance), expressed through spectral representation, and applied to open-system transport via scattering theory and wave operators. Ultimately, the manuscript proves a unified closure: all admissible electrical behavior is completely exhausted by the combination of gauge-covariant matter current, Maxwell field evolution, constitutive response, and boundary data.
We present a rigorous formulation of generalized Kohn-Sham density-functional theory. This provides a straightforward Kohn-Sham description of many-body systems based not only on particle-density but also on any other observable. We illustrate the formalism for the case of a particle-density based description of a nonrelativistic many-electron system. We obtain a simple diagrammatic expansion of the exchange-correlation functional in terms of Kohn-Sham single-particle orbitals and energies; develop systematic Kohn-Sham formulation for one-electron propagators and many-body excitation energies. This work is ideally suited for practical applications and provides a rigorous basis for a systematic development of the existing body of first-principles calculations in a controllable fashion.
The theoretical foundations of quantum mechanics and de Broglie–Bohm mechanics are analyzed and it is shown that both theories employ a formal approach to microphysics. By using a realistic approach it can be established that the internal structures of extended particles comply with a wave equation. Including external potentials yields the Schrödinger equation in this context, is arbitrary due to internal energy components. The statistical interpretation of wave functions in quantum theory as well as Heisenberg’s uncertainty relations are shown to be an expression of this, fundamental arbitrariness. Electrons and photons can be described by an identical formalism, providing formulations equivalent to the Maxwell equations. Electrostatic interactions justify the initial assumption of electron–wave stability: the stability of electron waves can be referred to vanishing intrinsic fields of interaction. The theory finally points out some fundamental difficulties for a fully covariant formulation of quantum electrodynamics, which seem to be related to the existing infinity problems in this field.
By introducing a set of auxiliary equations representing a many-body system, we have derived an extension of the Kohn-Sham scheme for the density functional theory. These equations consist of a Kohn-Sham-type equation determining single-particle orbitals and an eigen-value equation for an effective many-body problem. A variational method similar to the Kohn-Sham technique was utilized to derive effective interactions as well as effective potentials without artificial substitution of a Hubbard-type interaction and a mean-field correction in the energy functional. The second equation is described by an effective many-body Hamiltonian with both 2-body interactions and mean-field terms. Rigorous formulation of the extended Kohn-Sham equation is also given in accordance with the Hadjisavvas-Theophilou formulation. Our formulation can be interpreted as a way to define models of the strongly correlated electron systems, e.g. the Hubbard model
A classical field theory is proposed for the electric current and the electromagnetic field interpolating between microscopic and macroscopic domains. It represents a generalization of the density functional for the dynamics of the current and the electromagnetic field in the quantum side of the crossover and reproduces standard classical electrodynamics on the other side. The effective action derived in the closed time path formalism and the equations of motion follow from the variational principle. The polarization of the Dirac-sea can be taken into account in the quadratic approximation of the action by the introduction of the deplacement field strengths as in conventional classical electrodynamics. Decoherence appears naturally as a simple one-loop effect in this formalism. It is argued that the radiation time arrow is generated from the quantum boundary conditions in time by decoherence at the quantum-classical crossover and the Abraham-Lorentz force arises from the accelerating charge or from other charges in the macroscopic or the microscopic side, respectively. The functional form of the quantum renormalization group, the generalization of the renormalization group method for the density matrix, is proposed to follow the scale dependence through the quantum-classical crossover in a systematical manner.