Understanding the interaction between cavity photons and electronic nanocircuits is crucial for the development of Mesoscopic Quantum Electrodynamics (QED). One has to combine ingredients from atomic Cavity QED, like orbital degrees of freedom, with tunneling physics and strong cavity field inhomogeneities, specific to superconducting circuit QED. It is therefore necessary to introduce a formalism which bridges between these two domains. We develop a general method based on a photonic pseudo-potential to describe the electric coupling between electrons in a nanocircuit and cavity photons. In this picture, photons can induce simultaneously orbital energy shifts, tunneling, and local orbital transitions. We study in details the elementary example of a single quantum dot with a single normal metal reservoir, coupled to a cavity. Photon-induced tunneling terms lead to a non-universal relation between the cavity frequency pull and the damping pull. Our formalism can also be applied to multi quantum dot circuits, molecular circuits, quantum point contacts, metallic tunnel junctions, and superconducting nanostructures enclosing Andreev bound states or Majorana bound states, for instance.
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