Simulating Maxwell–Schrödinger Equations by High-Order Symplectic FDTD Algorithm

A novel symplectic algorithm is proposed to solve the Maxwell–Schrödinger (M–S) system for investigating light–matter interaction. Using the fourth-order symplectic integration and fourth-order collocated differences, M–S equations are discretized in temporal and spatial domains, respectively. The symplectic finite-difference time-domain (SFDTD) algorithm is developed for accurate and efficient study of coherent interaction between electromagnetic fields and artificial atoms. Particularly, the Dirichlet boundary condition is adopted for modeling the Rabi oscillation problems under the semiclassical framework. To implement the Dirichlet boundary condition, image theory is introduced, tailored to the high-order collocated differences. For validating the proposed SFDTD algorithm, three-dimensional numerical studies of the population inversion in the Rabi oscillation are presented. Numerical results show that the proposed high-order SFDTD(4, 4) algorithm exhibits better numerical performance than the conventional FDTD(2, 2) approach at the aspects of accuracy and efficiency for the long-term simulation. The proposed algorithm opens up a promising way toward a high-accurate energy-conservation modeling and simulation of complex dynamics in nanoscale light–matter interaction.