Understanding physical properties of quantum emitters strongly interacting with quantized electromagnetic modes, both discrete and continuous spectra, is one of the primary goals in the emergent field of waveguide quantum electrodynamics (QED). When the light-matter coupling strength is comparable to or even exceeds energies of elementary excitations, conventional approaches based on perturbative treatment of light-matter interactions, two-level description of matter excitations, and photon-number truncation are no longer sufficient. Here we study in and out of equilibrium properties of waveguide QED in such nonperturbative regimes by developing a comprehensive and rigorous theoretical approach using an asymptotic decoupling unitary transformation. We uncover several surprising features ranging from symmetry-protected many-body bound states in the continuum to strong renormalization of the effective mass and potential; the latter may explain recent experiments demonstrating cavity-induced changes in chemical reactivity as well as enhancements of ferromagnetism or superconductivity. We demonstrate these results by applying our general formalism to a model of coupled cavity arrays, which is relevant to experiments in superconducting qubits interacting with microwave resonators or atoms coupled to photonic crystals. We examine the relation between our results and delocalization-localization transition in the spin-boson model; notably, we point out that one can find a quantum phase transition akin to the superradiant transition in multi-emitter waveguide QED systems with superlinear photonic dispersion. Besides waveguide resonators, we discuss possible applications of our framework to other light-matter systems relevant to quantum optics, condensed matter physics, and quantum chemistry.
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