Simulation of light propagation in thin semiconductor films with non-local electron-photon interaction

The propagation of light in layered semiconductor media is described theoretically and simulated numerically within the framework of the non-equilibrium Green's function formalism as used for state-of-the-art nanodevice simulations, treating the non-local interaction of leaky photonic modes with the electronic states of thin semiconductor films on a non-equilibrium quantum statistical mechanics level of theory. For a diagonal photon self-energy corresponding to local coupling, the simulation results for a 500 nm GaAs slab under normal incidence are in excellent agreement with the predictions from the conventional transfer matrix method. The deviations of the local approximation from the result provided by the fully non-local photon self-energy for a 100 nm GaAs film are found to be small.