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Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society Series B

Evolution of superoscillations for spinning particles

Fabrizio Colombo, Elodie Pozzi, Irene Sabadini, Brett D. Wick

Published Apr 11, 2023• 6 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Superoscillating functions are band-limited functions that can oscillate faster than their fastest Fourier component. These functions appear in various fields of science and technology, in particular they were discovered in quantum mechanics in the context of weak values introduced by Y. Aharonov and collaborators. The evolution problem of superoscillatory functions as initial conditions for the Schrödinger equation is intensively studied nowadays and the supershift property of the solution of Schrödinger equation encodes the persistence of superoscillatory phenomenon during the evolution. In this paper, we prove that the evolution of a superoscillatory initial datum for spinning particles in a magnetic field has the supershift property. Our techniques are based on the exact propagator of spinning particles, the associated infinite order differential operators and their continuity on suitable spaces of entire functions with growth conditions.

DOI
10.1090/bproc/159

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Superoscillating functions are band-limited functions that can oscillate faster than their fastest Fourier component. These functions appear in various fields of science and technology, in particular they were discovered in quantum mechanics in the context of weak values introduced by Y. Aharonov and collaborators. The evolution problem of superoscillatory functions as initial conditions for the Schrödinger equation is intensively studied nowadays and the supershift property of the solution of Schrödinger equation encodes the persistence of superoscillatory phenomenon during the evolution. In this paper, we prove that the evolution of a superoscillatory initial datum for spinning particles in a magnetic field has the supershift property. Our techniques are based on the exact propagator of spinning particles, the associated infinite order differential operators and their continuity on suitable spaces of entire functions with growth conditions.
Aharonov-Berry superoscillations are band-limited functions that oscillate faster than their fastest Fourier component. Superoscillations appear in several fields of science and technology, such as Aharonov’s weak measurement in quantum mechanics, in optics, and in signal processing. An important issue is the study of the evolution of superoscillations using the Schrödinger equation when the initial datum is a weak value. Some superoscillatory functions are not square integrable, but they are real analytic functions that can be extended to entire holomorphic functions. This fact leads to the study of the continuity of a class of convolution operators acting on suitable spaces of entire functions with growth conditions. In this paper, we study the evolution of a superoscillatory initial datum in a uniform magnetic field. Moreover, we collect some results on convolution operators that appear in the theory of superoscillatory functions using a direct approach that allows the convolution operators to have non-constant coefficients of polynomial type.
Superoscillating functions and supershifts appear naturally in weak measurements in physics. Their evolution as initial conditions in the time-dependent Schrödinger equation is an important and challenging problem in quantum mechanics and mathematical analysis. The concept that encodes the persistence of superoscillations during the evolution is the (more general) supershift property of the solution. In this paper, we give a unified approach to determine the supershift property for the solution of the time-dependent one-dimensional Schrödinger equation. The main advantage and novelty of our results is that they only require suitable estimates and regularity assumptions on the Green’s function, but not its explicit form. With this efficient general technique, we are able to treat various potentials.
Weak measurements and the theory of weak values have a very deep meaning in quantum mechanics, and new phenomena associated with them has recently been observed experimentally. This theory has also directly led to the notion of superoscillating sequences of functions. In this paper we consider Cauchy problems with superoscillatory initial conditions (in particular, the Cauchy problem for the Schrödinger equation and some of its variations), and we give conditions under which the superoscillations persist in time. Our work is based on results from the theory of formal solutions to Cauchy problems and on the study of the specific growth of superoscillatory sequences, when regarded as functions of a complex variable. There are two main aims of this paper: one is to explain the mathematical tools that are necessary to study superoscillations, also repeating a few results that we have already proved in other papers in order to clarify the strategy. The second aim is to show that our technique applies to a large class of problems, showing under which conditions the superoscillatory phenomenon persists. Finally, we point out that our strategy can be applied also to non-constant coefficients differential equations as the quantum harmonic oscillator.
Superoscillating functions and supershifts appear naturally in weak measurements in physics. Their evolution as initial conditions in the time-dependent Schrödinger equation is an important and challenging problem in quantum mechanics and mathematical analysis. The concept that encodes the persistence of superoscillations during the evolution is the (more general) supershift property of the solution. In this paper, we give a unified approach to determine the supershift property for the solution of the time-dependent one-dimensional Schrödinger equation. The main advantage and novelty of our results is that they only require suitable estimates and regularity assumptions on the Green's function, but not its explicit form. With this efficient general technique, we are able to treat various potentials.
The path-integral technique in quantum mechanics provides an intuitive framework for comprehending particle propagation and scattering. Calculating the propagator for the Aharonov-Bohm potential fits into the range of potentials in multiply-connected spaces, with the propagator represented through a series expansion. In this paper, we analyze the Schrödinger evolution of superoscillations, showing the supershift properties of the solution to the Schrödinger equation for this potential. Our proof is based on the continuity of particular infinite order differential operators acting on spaces of entire functions.
In the past 50 years, quantum physicists have discovered, and experimentally demonstrated, a phenomenon which they termed superoscillations . Aharonov and his collaborators showed that superoscillations naturally arise when dealing with weak values, a notion that provides a fundamentally different way to regard measurements in quantum physics. From a mathematical point of view, superoscillating functions are a superposition of small Fourier components with a bounded Fourier spectrum, which result, when appropriately summed, in a shift that can be arbitrarily large, and well outside the spectrum. Purpose of this work is twofold: on one hand we provide a self-contained survey of the existing literature, in order to offer a systematic mathematical approach to superoscillations; on the other hand, we obtain some new and unexpected results, by showing that superoscillating sequences can be seen of as solutions to a large class of convolution equations and can therefore be treated within the theory of Analytically Uniform spaces. In particular, we will also discuss the persistence of the superoscillatory behavior when superoscillating sequences are taken as initial values of the Schrödinger equation and other equations.