Existence of Friedrich–Wintgen Bound States in the Continuum: System of Schrödinger Equations

A bound state in the continuum (BIC) is an eigenmode with the corresponding eigenvalue embedded in the continuous spectrum. There is currently significant research interest in BICs in the photonics community, because they can be used to induce strong resonances that are useful for lasing, sensing, harmonic generation, etc. The existence of BICs in classical or quantum wave systems has only been established for some relatively simple cases, such as BICs protected by symmetry. In 1985, Friedrich and Wintgen [ Phys. Rev. A, 32 (1985), pp. 3231–3242] suggested that BICs may appear from the destructive interference of two resonances coupled to a single radiation channel. They used a system of three one-dimensional (1D) Schrödinger equations to illustrate this process. Many BICs in classical wave systems seem to follow this mechanism and are now called Friedrich–Wintgen BICs. However, Friedrich and Wintgen did not show the existence of BICs in their system of three Schrödinger equations. Instead, they approximated the original system by a model with one Schrödinger equation and two algebraic equations and only analyzed BICs in the approximate model. In this paper, we give a rigorous justification for the existence of BICs in the original system of three 1D Schrödinger equations.