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Chinese Physics B

Quantum mechanical description of waveguides

Zhiyong Wang, Xiong Cai-Dong, Bing He

Published Nov 1, 2008• 4 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Applying the spinor representation of the electromagnetic field, this paper present a quantum-mechanical description of waveguides. As an example of application, a potential qubit generated by photon tunnelling is discussed.
DOI
10.1088/1674-1056/17/11/008

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The design of many quantum optical devices is attributed to the determination of spatially distributed parameters (e.g., refraction index in photonic crystal), which calls for a theoretical description for the spatial propagation of quantum fields. This paper discusses the spatial evolution of quantized electromagnetic fields in waveguide with spatially variant dielectric parameters, which is in parallel with the time evolution in the standard input-output formalism [C. W. Gardiner and M. J. Collett, Phys.Rev.A 31, 3761 (1985)]. This formalism is non-trivial to quantum optics in nonlinear and dispersive medium, and provides a new perspective of modeling and analyzing the control of quantum fields by matter.