Master equation for structured reservoirs

In this work we derive a master equation to describe the interaction of emitters with structured reservoirs. The equation is applicable when the ‘freezing’ of atomic population decay and the existence of an atom-photon bound state are possible. Furthermore, the equation may be used for arbitrarily strong excitations of the reservoir. We show that for a wide range of reservoir spectral densities, this master equation can be reduced to the Markovian form. Applications to spontaneous emission and resonance fluorescence near the band edge are considered. We demonstrate that the stationary state is strongly dependent on the initial state of the decaying atom-field system. For resonance fluorescence, we confirm the prediction of positive stationary atomic inversion.