Atom-Photon Bound States in Fractal Photonic Lattices: Localization Length and Anomalous Diffusion
Abstract
We study atom-photon bound states seeded by two-level emitters coupled to self-similar photonic lattices. By expressing the photonic Green's function through the heat kernel, we show that the far-field localization length obeys , with the detuning from the lower spectral edge and the walk dimension of the underlying fractal. This scaling is controlled by anomalous diffusion and does not rely on translational invariance or a band-edge effective-mass approximation. Exact diagonalization on Sierpi\'nski gaskets, pyramids, Vicsek graphs, and Sierpi\'nski carpets confirms the far-field prediction once the bath Hamiltonian is rendered Laplacian-like by compensating the local inhomogeneity in the connectivities with on-site potentials. In the near field, the bound-state amplitude exhibits an additional algebraic variation. For nested finitely ramified fractals, the corresponding exponent agrees with the classical resistance/ first-passage scaling, whereas Sierpi\'nski carpets display clear deviations from this simple law. Our results extend structured-bath waveguide QED to self-similar non-periodic geometries and connect bound-state profiles to transport exponents of the underlying fractal lattice.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2605.23625,
title = {Atom-Photon Bound States in Fractal Photonic Lattices: Localization Length and Anomalous Diffusion},
author = {Florian Bönsel and Flore K. Kunst and Federico Roccati},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.23625},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
11 pages, 5 figures