The study of electromagnetic waves in engineering optical materials presents opportunities to manipulate light transmission through various optical media such as fiber optic cables. Recent experiments in this field have explored materials that have balanced gain and absorption that occur at different locations. We can model such a system as a chain with nearest neighbor hopping, and balanced, parity and time reversal symmetric (PT-symmetric) impurities, and it is represented by a non-Hermitian Hamiltonian matrix. The emergence of complex energy eigenvalues for such a matrix corresponds to the PT-symmetry breaking. We numerically and analytically investigate the eigenvalues of such a non-Hermitian Hamiltonian for an open chain with N sites. We find that the critical impurity strength, when the PT-symmetry breaks, is determined by the hopping amplitude between the impurities t_b, and hopping amplitude outside the impurities t_o in a non-trivial way. As a consequence, we show that the PT-breaking in such an open chain can be dramatically tuned by changing the hopping amplitude. Our results suggest that small changes in such systems, created in optical waveguides, can lead to significant changes for wave propagation through them (Joglekar, Y. N.,& Barnett, J. L., (2011). Origin of maximal symmetry breaking in even PT-symmetric lattices, Physical Review A, 84, 024103.)
The study of electromagnetic waves in engineering optical materials presents opportunities to manipulate light transmission through various optical media such as fiber optic cables. Recent experiments in this field have explored materials that have balanced gain and absorption that occur at different locations. We can model such a system as a chain with nearest neighbor hopping, and balanced, parity and time reversal symmetric (PT-symmetric) impurities, and it is represented by a non-Hermitian Hamiltonian matrix. The emergence of complex energy eigenvalues for such a matrix corresponds to the PT-symmetry breaking. We numerically and analytically investigate the eigenvalues of such a non-Hermitian Hamiltonian for an open chain with N sites. We find that the critical impurity strength, when the PT-symmetry breaks, is determined by the hopping amplitude between the impurities t_b, and hopping amplitude outside the impurities t_o in a non-trivial way. As a consequence, we show that the PT-breaking in such an open chain can be dramatically tuned by changing the hopping amplitude. Our results suggest that small changes in such systems, created in optical waveguides, can lead to significant changes for wave propagation through them (Joglekar, Y. N.,& Barnett, J. L., (2011). Origin of maximal symmetry breaking in even PT-symmetric lattices, Physical Review A, 84, 024103.)
More than a decade ago, it was shown that non-Hermitian Hamiltonians with combined parity (P) and time-reversal (T ) symmetry exhibit real eigenvalues over a range of parameters. Since then, the field of PT symmetry has seen rapid progress on both the theoretical and experimental fronts. These effective Hamiltonians are excellent candidates for describing open quantum systems with balanced gain and loss. Nature seems to be replete with examples of PT -symmetric systems; in fact, recent experimental investigations have observed the effects of PT symmetry breaking in systems as diverse as coupled mechanical pendula, coupled optical waveguides, and coupled electrical circuits. Recently, PT -symmetric Hamiltonians for tight-binding lattice models have been extensively investigated. Lattice models, in general, have been widely used in physics due to their analytical and numerical tractability. Perhaps one of the best systems for experimentally observing the effects of PT symmetry breaking in a one-dimensional lattice with tunable hopping is an array of evanescently-coupled optical waveguides. The tunneling between adjacent waveguides is tuned by adjusting the width of the barrier between them, and the imaginary part of the local refractive index provides the loss or gain in the respective waveguide. Calculating the time evolution of a wave packet on a lattice is relatively straightforward in the tight-binding model, allowing us to make predictions about the behavior of light propagating down an array of PT -symmetric waveguides. In this thesis, I investigate the the strength of the PT -symmetric phase (the region over which the eigenvalues are purely real) in lattices with a variety of PT - symmetric potentials. In Chapter 1, I begin with a brief review of the postulates of quantum mechanics, followed by an outline of the fundamental principles of PT - symmetric systems. Chapter 2 focuses on one-dimensional uniform lattices with a pair of PT -symmetric impurities in the case of open boundary conditions. I find that the PT phase is algebraically fragile except in the case of closest impurities, where the PT phase remains nonzero. In Chapter 3, I examine the case of periodic boundary conditions in uniform lattices, finding that the PT phase is not only nonzero, but also independent of the impurity spacing on the lattice. In addition, I explore the time evolution of a single-particle wave packet initially localized at a site. I find that in the case of periodic boundary conditions, the wave packet undergoes a preferential clockwise or counterclockwise motion around the ring. This behavior is quantified by a discrete momentum operator which assumes a maximum value at the PT -symmetry- breaking threshold. In Chapter 4, I investigate nonuniform lattices where the parity-symmetric hop- ping between neighboring sites can be tuned. I find that the PT phase remains strong in the case of closest impurities and fragile elsewhere. Chapter 5 explores the effects of the competition between localized and extended PT potentials on a lattice. I show that when the short-range impurities are maximally separated on the lattice, the PT phase is strengthened by adding short-range loss in the broad-loss region. Consequently, I predict that a broken PT symmetry can be restored by increasing the strength of the short-range impurities. Lastly, Chapter 6 summarizes my salient results and discusses areas which can be further developed in future research.
By investigating a parity- and time-reversal- (PT-) symmetric, N-site lattice with impurities $\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}i\ensuremath{\gamma}$ and hopping amplitudes t0(tb) for regions outside (between) the impurity locations, we probe the interimpurity-distance dependence of the critical impurity strength and the origin of maximal PT-symmetry breaking that occurs when the impurities are nearest neighbors. Through a simple and exact derivation, we prove that the critical impurity strength is equal to the hopping amplitude between the impurities, ${\ensuremath{\gamma}}_{c}={t}_{b}$, and the simultaneous emergence of N complex eigenvalues is a robust feature of any PT-symmetric hopping profile. Our results show that the threshold strength ${\ensuremath{\gamma}}_{c}$ can be widely tuned by a small change in the global profile of the lattice and thus have experimental implications.
Analysis of fundamentally open systems which exhibit both spatial reflection (parity) and time-reversal symmetry, called PT-symmetric [1] systems, has played an important role in understanding the dynamics of a broad class of non-Hermitian systems. Such systems support distinct regimes of stability and instability respectively, and the transition between these plays an important role in the system dynamics. We investigate a variety of non-Hermitian systems which exhibit a PT-symmetry breaking transition in both classical and quantum contexts using an array of theoretical and numerical approaches which are directly amenable to physical experiments. Organizationally, we divide these studies into those done on classical and quantum systems. Specifically for classical systems we analyze several interesting phenomena in the context of optical waveguide arrays. These provide an important testing ground for much of the discrete, PT-symmetric theory. In our case, we analyze PT-symmetric extensions of several interesting lattice models. Firstly, we explore single gain/loss pair, PT-symmetric extensions of the Su-Schreiffer-Heeger (SSH) model [2] and the Aubry-Andre-Harper (AAH) model [3,4]. In both cases, we find a veiled symmetry which is responsible for the PT-symmetry. Secondly we expand upon the Rudner-Levitov (RL) model [5,6], a non-Hermitian extension of the SSH model with multiple gain/loss pairs, and we explore the dependence of topological phenomena on changes in the initial state as well as their robustness in the presence of gain-induced nonlinearity. For quantum systems, we explore the rich PT-symmetric phase diagram resulting from time-periodic, Floquet PT-symmetry [7,8]. This is experimentally implementable in ultracold atomic systems [9], and features a reentrant PT-symmetric phase. Secondly, we examine quantum multi-photon statistics for a simple non-Hermitian model which is transformed and mapped to a system with unitary evolution via a unitary dilation, and is fully realizable on a small-scale quantum simulator [10].
We investigate the properties of an N-site tight-binding lattice with periodic boundary conditions (PBCs) in the presence of a pair of gain and loss impurities $\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}i\ensuremath{\gamma}$ and two tunneling amplitudes, t0 and tb, that are constant along the two paths that connect them. We show that the parity and time-reversal (PT)-symmetric phase of the lattice with PBCs are robust, insensitive to the distance between the impurities, and that the critical impurity strength for PT-symmetry breaking is given by ${\ensuremath{\gamma}}_{\mathrm{PT}}=|{t}_{0}\ensuremath{-}{t}_{b}|$. We study the time-evolution of a typical wave packet, initially localized on a single site, across the PT-symmetric phase boundary. We find that it acquires nonzero chirality for $\ensuremath{\gamma}\ensuremath{\ne}0$, and the associated momentum reaches a universal maximum value at the threshold, $\ensuremath{\gamma}={\ensuremath{\gamma}}_{\mathrm{PT}}$, irrespective of the initial location of the wave packet and the lattice parameters. Our results imply that PT-symmetry breaking on a lattice with PBCs has consequences that have no counterpart in open chains.
We study the properties of a parity- and time-reversal- (PT) symmetric tight-binding chain of size N with position-dependent hopping amplitude. In contrast to the fragile PT-symmetric phase of a chain with constant hopping and imaginary impurity potentials, we show that, under very general conditions, our model is always in the PT-symmetric phase. We numerically obtain the energy spectrum and the density of states of such a chain, and show that they are widely tunable. By studying the size dependence of inverse participation ratios, we show that although the chain is not translationally invariant, most of its eigenstates are extended. Our results indicate that tight-binding models with non-Hermitian, PT-symmetric hopping have a robust PT-symmetric phase and rich dynamics which may be explored in coupled waveguides.
The occurrence of parity-time reversal (PT) symmetry breaking is discussed in a non-Hermitian spin chain. The Hermiticity of the model is broken by the presence of an alternating, imaginary, transverse magnetic field. A full real spectrum, which occurs if and only if all the eigenvectors are PT symmetric, can appear only in presence of dimerization, i.e., only if the hopping amplitudes between nearest-neighbor spins assume alternate values along the chain. In order to make a connection between such system and the Hermitian world, we study the critical magnetic properties of the model and look for the conditions that would allow to observe the same phase diagram in the absence of the imaginary field. Such procedure amounts to renormalizing the spin-spin coupling amplitudes.