Quantum gap solitons and soliton pinning in dispersive medium and photonic-band-gap materials: Bethe-ansatz solution

Abstract

Quantum electrodynamics of a single two-level atom placed within a frequency dispersive medium whose polariton spectrum has a gap due to photon coupling to a medium excitation (exciton, optical phonon, etc.) is studied. Despite a nonlocal effective polariton-polariton coupling, the system is proven to be integrable and is diagonalized exactly by means of the Bethe-ansatz technique. Its spectrum consists of bound many-polariton complexes (quantum solitons) and exhibits some unusual features due to the existence of the polaritonic gap. Only solitons containing an even number of polaritons propagate within the gap, while a soliton with an odd number of polaritons is pinned to the atom and forms a many-polariton-atom bound state, in which the radiation and the medium polarization are localized in the vicinity of the atom. The model under consideration has a quite general structure and can also be applied to the case of photonic-band-gap materials. \textcopyright{} 1996 The American Physical Society.