Abstract. The self-interaction of an electron in the photonic crystal medium is investigated. We show that modification of the self-interaction of electrons in photonic crystals is very significant and, as a consequence, at some photon frequencies the electron-light interaction becomes effectively strong.
IntroductionPhotonic crystals (PC) are periodic systems that consist of dielectrics with different refractive indices. Its periodic dielectric function yields a photonic band structure with photonic band gaps. It has been shown that such a structure leads to quantum effects, including the coherent control of the spontaneous emission [1], the appearance of photon-atom bound states [2][3][4][5], the non-Markovian character of radiative decay [6], enhanced quantum interference effects [7], the localization of superradiance near the photonic band edge [8] and the modification of Lamb shift [2,3,[9][10][11][12][13]. At the same time, in Ref. [14] it has been shown that there is a novel effect in PC medium which consists in the fact that the rest mass of an electron should change its value. Actually, this effect is another consequence of the periodic changing of the photonmatter interaction in the PC medium. The origin of the effect is the significant modification of the electromagnetic field in the PC medium. In this paper we investigate the influence of the modification of the photonic density of states (DOS) in PC on the self-interaction of electrons.