Quantum aspects of optical energy transfer in cavities and layered media

We study the quantized electromagnetic (EM) field in cavities and cavity like structures and develop models to describe EM energy transfer. Our starting point is based on including the quantum mechanical field-matter interaction in the traveling wave (TW) formalism with appropriate boundary conditions accounting for the interference to obtain the spatially resolved quantized field operators. This allows evaluating the Poynting vector to calculate e.g. the energy fluxes through a cavity structure, the energy emitted and absorbed by an element placed in a leaky cavity and the formation of its steady state.