Vacancy-like Dressed States in Topological Waveguide QED

Abstract

We identify a class of dressed atom-photon states forming at the same energy of the atom at any coupling strength. As a hallmark, their photonic component is an eigenstate of the bare photonic bath with a vacancy in place of the atom. The picture accommodates waveguide-QED phenomena where atoms behave as perfect mirrors, connecting in particular dressed bound states (BS) in the continuum or BIC with geometrically-confined photonic modes. When applied to photonic lattices, the framework provides a general criterion to predict dressed BS in lattices with topological properties by putting them in one-to-one correspondence with photonic BS. New classes of dressed BS are thus predicted in the photonic Creutz-ladder and Haldane models. In the latter case, states with non-zero local photon flux occur, where an atom is dressed by a photon orbiting around it.