Characterizing strong light-atom interaction by a self-consistent solution to Maxwell-Schrödinger equations

Summary form only given. Strong light-atom interaction is at the heart of atomic, molecular and optical physics; and is also important to quantum optics, quantum computing, nuclear magnetic resonance and laser. When an atom (or two-level system) is illuminated by a coherent beam of photons, it will cyclically absorb photons and re-emit them by stimulated emission, which is called Rabi oscillation. Here we developed a semiclassical framework to model the phenomenon via a self-consistent solution to Maxwell-Schrödinger equations. Different from Maxwell-Bloch equations, the wave function of the atom replacing for the density matrix nonlinearly interacts with the magnetic vector potential under coulomb gauge condition. A well-posed time evolution system derived from light-atom Hamiltonian is numerically solved by finite-difference time-domain method. The developed semiclassical Maxwell-Schrödinger framework could be generalized to model light-exciton interaction in semiconductor nanostructures.