Quantum Electrodynamical Bloch Theory with Homogeneous Magnetic Fields
Physical Review Letters 123, 047202 (2019)
Quantum Electrodynamical Bloch Theory with Homogeneous Magnetic Fields
We propose a solution to the problem of Bloch electrons in a homogeneous magnetic field by including the quantum fluctuations of the photon field. A generalized quantum electrodynamical (QED)-Bloch theory from first principles is presented. In the limit of vanishing quantum fluctuations, we recover the standard results of solid-state physics: the fractal spectrum of the Hofstadter butterfly. As a further application, we show how the well-known Landau physics is modified by the photon field and that Landau polaritons emerge. This shows that our QED-Bloch theory does not only allow us to capture the physics of solid-state systems in homogeneous magnetic fields but also novel features that appear at the interface of condensed matter physics and quantum optics.
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- http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.123.047202
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- http://arxiv.org/abs/1808.02389
- Notes
- We would like to thank M. Altarelli, J. Faist, H. Huebener, A. Imamoglu, J. Kaye, and A. Millis for insightful discussions. M. P. acknowledges support by the Erwin Schrödinger Fellowship No. J 4107-N27 of the FWF (Austrian Science Fund). M. A. S. acknowledges financial support by the DFG through the Emmy Noether programme (No. SE 2558/2-1). A. R. acknowledges financial support by the European Research Council (No. ERC-2015-AdG-694097). The Flatiron Institute is a division of the Simons Foundation.
Related Projects
- Center for Computational Quantum Physics (CCQ), The Flatiron Institute, New York
- MPSD-Max-Planck Hamburg