Constrained dynamics of excitation transfer due to a structured nano system

Optical near-field phenomena observed in nanoscale systems were recently proposed to be applied to nanofabrication and nanophotonic devices. One of the elementary near-field processes is excitation transfer that originates from near-field photons localized in nanoscale space, which are different from propagating far-field photons. In recent experiments, excitation transfer has been controlled by semiconductor nanostructures under external fields. In this paper, we present a full-quantum-mechanical theory of near-field excitation transfer, and clarify the mechanism of effective interaction between matter and near-field photons.