Full minimal coupling Maxwell-TDDFT: an ab initio QED framework beyond the dipole approximation

Abstract

We report the first ab initio, non-relativistic QED method that couples light and matter self-consistently beyond the electric dipole approximation and without multipolar truncations. This method is based on an extension of the known Maxwell-Pauli-Kohn-Sham approach for the use of a full minimal coupling Hamiltonian, where the space- and time-dependent vector potential is coupled to the matter system, and its back-reaction to the radiated fields is generated by the full current density. The implementation in the open-source Octopus code is designed for massively-parallel multiscale simulations considering different grid spacings for the Maxwell and matter subsystems. Here, we show the first applications of this framework to simulate renormalized Cherenkov radiation of an electronic wavepacket, magnetooptical effects with non-chiral light in non-chiral molecular systems, and renormalized plasmonic modes in a nanoplasmonic dimer. We show that in some cases the beyond-dipole effects can not be captured by a multipolar expansion Hamiltonian in length gauge. Finally, we discuss further opportunities enabled by the framework in the field of twisted light and orbital angular momentum, inelastic light scattering and strong field physics.