2024/03/25 by Artuur Stevens, Christophe Caloz, Stevens, Artuur +1
Engineering · Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #Metamaterials and Metasurfaces Applications #Optics (physics.optics) #Quantum Physics (quant-ph) #Quantum optics and atomic interactions #Terahertz technology and applications
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2404.04273
openalex publication_date 2024/03/25 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We present a general theory for calculating photon transitions in arbitrarily time-varying metamaterials. This theory circumvents the difficulties of conventional approaches in solving such a general problem by exploiting the eigenstates of time-dependent number operators. We demonstrate here the temporal evolution of these operators and the related transition probabilities for the cases of logistic and linear permittivity profiles. The theory is potentially extensible to arbitrary space-time modulations and may hence lead to multiple novel quantum effects and applications.