English

Ground-State Quantum-Electrodynamical Density-Functional Theory

Quantum Physics 2017-08-07 v2

Abstract

In this work we establish a density-functional reformulation of coupled matter-photon problems subject to general external electromagnetic fields and charge currents. We first show that for static minimally-coupled matter-photon systems an external electromagnetic field is equivalent to an external charge current. We employ this to show that scalar external potentials and transversal external charge currents are in a one-to-one correspondence to the expectation values of the charge density and the vector-potential of the correlated matter-photon ground state. This allows to establish a Maxwell-Kohn-Sham approach, where in conjunction with the usual single-particle Kohn-Sham equations a classical Maxwell equation has to be solved. In the magnetic mean-field limit this reduces to a current-density-functional theory that does not suffer from non-uniqueness problems and if furthermore the magnetic field is zero recovers standard density-functional theory.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1509.01417,
  title  = {Ground-State Quantum-Electrodynamical Density-Functional Theory},
  author = {M. Ruggenthaler},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1509.01417},
  year   = {2017}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-22T10:49:11.499Z