  A theory of both linear and nonlinear electromagnetic response of a single QD
exposed to quantum light, accounting the depolarization induced local--field
has been developed. Based on the microscopic Hamiltonian accounting for the
electron--hole exchange interaction, an effective two--body Hamiltonian has
been derived and expressed in terms of the incident electric field, with a
separate term describing the QD depolarization. The quantum equations of motion
have been formulated and solved with the Hamiltonian for various types of the
QD excitation, such as Fock qubit, coherent fields, vacuum state of
electromagnetic field and light with arbitrary photonic state distribution. For
a QD exposed to coherent light, we predict the appearance of two oscillatory
regimes in the Rabi effect separated by the bifurcation. In the first regime,
the standard collapse--revivals phenomenon do not reveal itself and the QD
population inversion is found to be negative, while in the second one, the
collapse--revivals picture is found to be strongly distorted as compared with
that predicted by the standard Jaynes-Cummings model. %The model developed can
easily be extended to %%electromagnetic excitation. For the case of QD
interaction with arbitrary quantum light state in the linear regime, it has
been shown that the local field induce a fine structure of the absorbtion
spectrum. Instead of a single line with frequency corresponding to which the
exciton transition frequency, a duplet is appeared with one component shifted
by the amount of the local field coupling parameter. It has been demonstrated
the strong light--mater coupling regime arises in the weak-field limit. A
physical interpretation of the predicted effects has been proposed.
