Few-mode field quantization for multiple emitters

The control of the interaction between quantum emitters using nanophotonic structures holds great promise for quantum technology applications, while its theoretical description for complex nanostructures is a highly demanding task as the electromagnetic (EM) modes form a high-dimensional continuum. We here introduce an approach that permits a quantized description of the full EM field through a small number of discrete modes. This extends the previous work in ref. (I. Medina, F. J. García-Vidal, A. I. Fernández-Domínguez, and J. Feist, “Few-mode field quantization of arbitrary electromagnetic spectral densities,” Phys. Rev. Lett., vol. 126, p. 093601, 2021) to the case of an arbitrary number of emitters, without any restrictions on the emitter level structure or dipole operators. The low computational demand of this method makes it suitable for studying dynamics for a wide range of parameters. We illustrate the power of our approach for a system of three emitters placed within a hybrid metallodielectric photonic structure and show that excitation transfer is highly sensitive to the properties of the hybrid photonic–plasmonic modes.