Effect of Berry's Phase in a Degenerate System

Hiroshi Asakura

Stefan Giller, Cezary Gonera, Piotr Kosiński +1 more

X. B. Wang, Koichi Matsumoto, Heng Fan +2 more

In a nondegenerate syste, the abelian Berry's phase will never cause transitions among the Hamiltonian's eigenstate. However, in a degenerate syatem, it is well known that the state transition can be caused by the non-abelian Berry phase. Actually, in a such a system, the phase factor is not always nonabelian. Even in the case that the phase is a nondiagonal matrix, it still can be an abelian phase and can cause the state transitions. We then propose a simple scheme to detect such an effect of the Berry phase to the degenerate states by using the optical entangled pair state. In this scheme, we need not control any external parameters during the quantum state evolution.

K.M.Fonseca Romero, A.C.Aguiar Pinto, M. T. Thomaz

Martin Ligare

The full effect of adiabatically varying Hamiltonians on systems prepared in eigenstates of the stationary Hamiltonian often includes geometric Berry's phases. For degenerate systems these effects may result in transitions between distinct degenerate eigenstates that can be described in terms of a non-Abelian gauge potential. I demonstrate the explicit dynamic origin of such transitions between degenerate angular-momentum sublevels in an atom that is subject to collinear electric and magnetic fields that rotate adiabatically. The origin of the effects becomes clear when eigenstates of the total Hamiltonian, which includes the rotating fields, are calculated. The total Hamiltonian removes the degeneracy, and the eigenstates are in some cases linear combinations of the angular-momentum sublevels. Thus a system prepared in a specific sublevel may not remain in that sublevel, and the transition probability is exactly that given by an analysis of the geometric phase.

Alexei A. Mailybaev, Oleg N. Kirillov, Alexander P. Seyranian