Optical computing of quantum revivals

Abstract

Interference is the mechanism through which waves can be structured into the most fascinating patterns. While for sensing, imaging, trapping, or in fundamental investigations, structured waves play nowadays an important role and are becoming the subject of many interesting studies. Using a coherent optical field as a probe, we show how to structure light into distributions presenting collapse and revival structures in its wavefront. These distributions are obtained from the Fourier spectrum of an arrangement of aperiodic diffracting structures. Interestingly, the resulting interference may present quasiperiodic structures of diffraction peaks on a number of distance scales, even though the diffracting structure is not periodic. We establish an analogy with revival phenomena in the evolution of quantum mechanical systems and illustrate this computation numerically and experimentally, obtaining excellent agreement with the proposed theory.

Effects of Impurities and Deformations on Electronic Effective Mass in Quantum Revival Time within the Infinite Square Well

“…Future work perspectives include the need to investigate higher-dimensional systems, such as the use of electronic metamaterials [28], variable mass systems [29] and curvature effects [30], among other things. These aspects may lead to exploring the impacts of quantum revivals on optical and electronic properties [31], as well as investigating more elaborate versions of thermal machines with impurities beyond those discussed in [18], taking into account finite-time thermodynamics.…”