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Physical Review A

Electromagnetic field quantization in an absorbing medium

Reza Matloob

Published Jul 1, 1999• 57 citations
Publisher

Abstract

A three-dimensional electromagnetic field quantization scheme is developed using the Green's-function method in a homogeneous medium that shows loss and dispersion. Special attention is paid to the decomposition of the quantized fields into their longitudinal and transverse parts. The characteristic nature of these two parts is discussed. To demonstrate the generality of this formulation, the field quantization in lossless dispersive media and in free space is obtained by imposing appropriate limits. We also calculate the vacuum fluctuations of the field for the transverse and longitudinal parts separately.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.60.50

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A three-dimensional electromagnetic field quantization scheme is developed using the Green's-function method in a homogeneous medium that shows loss and dispersion. Special attention is paid to the decomposition of the quantized fields into their longitudinal and transverse parts. The characteristic nature of these two parts is discussed. To demonstrate the generality of this formulation, the field quantization in lossless dispersive media and in free space is obtained by imposing appropriate limits. We also calculate the vacuum fluctuations of the field for the transverse and longitudinal parts separately.
The electromagnetic field is quantized in dielectric media that show both loss and dispersion. The complex dielectric function of the medium is assumed to be a known function and the loss is modeled by Langevin forces in the forms of noise current operators. The noise current correlation function is related to the assumed dielectric function by the fluctuation-dissipation theorem. Field quantization is carried out for the infinite homogeneous dielectric, the semi-infinite dielectric, and the dielectric slab, where the fields in the second and third cases are restricted to propagation perpendicular to the dielectric surfaces. The forms of the vector potential operator are obtained in the different spatial regions for all three geometries, and in each case the required canonical commutation relation for the vector potential and its conjugate generalized momentum operator is verified. The spatial dependence of the vacuum field fluctuations is calculated for the two dielectric geometries that have surfaces.
A quantization scheme for the electromagnetic field in absorbing dielectrics developed previously is extended to cover more complicated arrangements of dielectric media and to investigate various limiting cases of the general formalism. The limiting cases include media that have vanishing imaginary parts in their dielectric functions, because either the refractive index or the extinction coefficient vanishes. The further limit of a unit real dielectric function establishes the connection of the formalism with the well-known quantized field expressions in free space. Detailed calculations are presented for the quantization in the system of two different absorbing dielectrics in contact at a plane interface and for the cavity formed in the free space between two separated absorbing dielectrics. The forms of the field operators are determined for both systems, the canonical commutation relations are verified, and the spectra of the vacuum field fluctuations are calculated and illustrated. The calculations are restricted throughout to fields that propagate perpendicular to the dielectric interfaces. \textcopyright{} 1996 The American Physical Society.
The macroscopic electromagnetic field is quantized in the presence of a uniformly moving permeable dielectric medium. We begin with the Maxwell-Minkowski equations, and the fields are quantized with the help of the Green function scheme. It is shown that for a homogeneous material, though the medium is assumed to be isotropic in its rest frame, it displays anisotropic character for the observer who detects the field observables in the laboratory frame. The field operators are expressed in terms of two independent infinite sets of bosonic field operators. Special attention is paid to the vacuum field fluctuation in moving media.
A quantization scheme for the phenomenological Maxwell theory of the full electromagnetic field in an inhomogeneous three-dimensional, dispersive, and absorbing dielectric medium is developed. The classical Maxwell equations with spatially varying and Kramers-Kronig consistent permittivity are regarded as operator-valued field equations, introducing additional current- and charge-density operator fields in order to take into account the noise associated with the dissipation in the medium. It is shown that the equal-time commutation relations between the fundamental electromagnetic fields $\mathbf{E}^$ and $\mathbf{B}^$ and the potentials $\mathbf{A}^$ and $\stackrel{^}{\ensuremath{\varphi}}$ in the Coulomb gauge can be expressed in terms of the Green tensor of the classical problem. From the Green tensors for bulk material and an inhomogeneous medium consisting of two bulk dielectrics with a common planar interface it is explicitly proven that the well-known equal-time commutation relations of QED are preserved.
We present a one-dimensional quantization scheme for the electromagnetic field in arbitrary planar absorbing and dispersive dielectrics, taking into account explicitly the finite extent of media. The complete form of the electric field operator includes a part that corresponds to the free fields incident from the vacuum towards the medium and a particular solution which can be expressed by using the classical Green-function integral representation of the electromagnetic field. By expressing the classical Green function in terms of the light modes of the dielectric structure, we obtain a natural generalization to absorbing media of the familiar method of mode expansion which strictly applies to non-absorbing media. As an application of our mode expansion, we obtain general quantum-optical input-output relations relating the output photon operators in vacuum to the input photon operators and to the reservoir noise operators. The input-output relations obtained are uniquely determined by the knowledge of the classical light modes of the planar system. We finally show that our quantization scheme for arbitrary planar dielectrics satisfies the prescribed equal-time commutation relations of QED.
There are both loss and dispersion characteristics for most dielectric media. In quantum theory the loss in medium is generally described by Langevin force in the Langevin noise (LN) scheme by which the quantization of the radiation field in various homogeneous absorbing dielectrics can be successfully actualized. However, it is invalid for the anisotropic dispersion medium. This paper extends the LN theory to an anisotropic dispersion medium and presented the quantization of the radiation field as well as the transformation relation between the homogeneous and anisotropic dispersion media.