QED-based Optical Bloch Equations without electric dipole approximation: A model for a two-level atom interacting with a monochromatic X-ray laser beam

Abstract

We derive a set of optical Bloch equations (OBEs) directly from the minimal-coupling Hamiltonian density of the bound-state quantum electrodynamics (bound-state QED). Such optical Bloch equations are beyond the former widely-used ones due to that there is no electric dipole approximation (EDA) on the minimal-coupling Hamiltonian density of the bound-state QED. Then our optical Bloch equations can describe a two-level atom interacting with a monochromatic light of arbitrary wavelength, which are suitable to study the spectroscopy and the Rabi oscillations of two-level atoms in X-ray laser beams since that the wavelength of X-ray is close to an atom to make the electric dipole approximation (EDA) invalid.