Giant lamb shift in photonic crystals.
We obtain a general result for the Lamb shift of excited states of multilevel atoms in inhomogeneous electromagnetic structures and apply it to study atomic hydrogen in inverse-opal photonic crystals. We find that the photonic-crystal environment can lead to very large values of the Lamb shift, as compared to the case of vacuum. We also suggest that the position-dependent Lamb shift should extend from a single level to a miniband for an assembly of atoms with random distribution in space, similar to the velocity-dependent Doppler effect in atomic/molecular gases.
Nonlinear Physics Centre and Center for Ultra-High Bandwidth Devices for Optical Systems (CUDOS), Research School of Physical Sciences and Engineering, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia. xhw124@rsphysse.anu.edu.au
Xue-Hua
XH
Wang
Yuri S
YS
Kivshar
Ben-Yuan
BY
Gu