The Nonexponential Decay Law and Interference Experiments

Asher Peres

J.M. Delory, Catherine Tric

S. M. Wang, Witold Nazarewicz, Alexander Volya +1 more

The most important law of radioactivity is that of the exponential decay. In the realm of quantum mechanics, however, this decay law is neither rigorous nor fundamental. The deviations from the exponential decay have been observed experimentally at the early stage of a decay process, but there is little evidence for nonexponential behavior at long times. Yet such long-term nonexponentiality is expected theoretically to probe the nonresonant background components of the initial wave function which preserve the structural interference and the memory of how the state was created. In this paper, we propose new observables that can be used for experimental investigations of the post-exponential decay regime, including the decay of threshold resonances, particle correlations in three-body decays, and interference between near-lying resonances. While the specific examples presented in this work pertain to atomic nuclei, the properties of nonexponential decay are generic, i.e., they apply to other many-body open quantum systems, such as hadrons, atoms, molecules, and nanostructures.

Francesco Plastina, Francesco Piperno

Alec Cao, Cora J. Fujiwara, Roshan Sajjad +3 more

Abstract Exponential decay laws describe systems ranging from unstable nuclei to fluorescent molecules, in which the probability of jumping to a lower-energy state in any given time interval is static and history-independent. These decays, involving only a metastable state and fluctuations of the quantum vacuum, are the most fundamental nonequilibrium process and provide a microscopic model for the origins of irreversibility. Despite the fact that the apparently universal exponential decay law has been precisely tested in a variety of physical systems, it is a surprising truth that quantum mechanics requires that spontaneous decay processes have nonexponential time dependence at both very short and very long times. Cold-atom experiments have proven to be powerful probes of fundamental decay processes; in this article, we propose the use of Bose condensates in Floquet–Bloch bands as a probe of long-time nonexponential decay in single isolated emitters. We identify a range of parameters that should enable observation of long-time deviations and experimentally demonstrate a key element of the scheme: tunable decay between quasi-energy bands in a driven optical lattice.