The effect of finite control beam on the transverse spatial profile of the slow light propagation in an electromagnetically induced transparency medium is studied. We arrive at a general criterion in terms of eigenequation, and demonstrate the existence of a set of localized, stationary transverse modes for the negative detuning of the probe signal field. Each of these diffraction-free transverse modes has its own characteristic group velocity, smaller than the conventional theoretical result without considering the transverse spatial effect.
We propose an experimental setup for studying the Anderson localization of light in the continuous transverse spatial degrees of freedom of the photons. This physical phenomenon can be observed in the transverse profile of a paraxial and quasi-monochromatic beam of light using a spatial light modulator. The light modulator acts in the laser beam as a weak random potential. Here, differently from the standard models studied in the literature, our setup splits the dispersion and potential terms along the beam evolution. By numerical simulations we confirm the feasibility of our experimental prop…
Slow growth of quantum magic in disorder-free Stark many-body localization
Institute for Quantum Science and Technology, Shanghai University（上海大学量子科学与技术研究院）；Department of Physics, National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学物理系）；School of Physics and Optoelectronics, Xiangtan University（湘潭大学物理与光电工程学院）
The Fresnel-Fizeau effect of transverse drag, in which the trajectory of a light beam changes due to transverse motion of the optical medium, is usually extremely small and hard to detect. We observe transverse drag in a moving hot-vapor cell, utilizing slow light due to electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT). The drag effect is enhanced by a factor 360,000, corresponding to the ratio between the light speed in vacuum and the group velocity under EIT conditions. We study the contribution of the thermal atomic motion, which is much faster than the mean medium velocity, and identify the …
We propose fast all-optical control of surface polaritons (SPs) by placing an electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) medium at an interface between two materials. EIT provides longitudinal compression and a slow group velocity while matching properties of the two materials at the interface provides strong transverse confinement. In particular we show that an EIT medium near the interface between a dielectric and a negative-index metamaterial can establish tight longitudinal and transverse confinement plus extreme slowing of SPs, in both transverse electric and transverse magnetic polar…
Conformational effect on electronic localization is critically investigated for the first time considering a double-stranded helical geometry (DSHG) subjected to an electric field. In the presence of electric field the DSHG behaves like a correlated disordered system whose site potentials are modulated in a cosine form like the well known Aubry-Andre-Harper (AAH) model. The potential distribution can be modulated further by changing the orientation of the incident field. A similar kind of cosine modulation is also introduced in the inter-strand hopping integrals of the DSHG. Suitably adjusting…
We study in detail the properties of the quantum East model, an interacting quantum spin chain inspired by simple kinetically-constrained models of classical glasses. Through a combination of analytics, exact diagonalization and tensor-network methods we show the existence of a transition, from a fast to a slow thermalization regime, which manifests itself throughout the spectrum. On the slow side, by exploiting the localization of the ground state and the form of the Hamiltonian, we explicitly construct a large (exponential in size) number of non-thermal states which become exact finite-energ…
In the presence of sufficiently strong disorder or quasiperiodic fields, an interacting many-body system can fail to thermalize and become many-body localized. The associated transition is of particular interest, since it occurs not only in the ground state but over an extended range of energy densities. So far, theoretical studies of the transition have focused mainly on the case of true-random disorder. In this work, we experimentally and numerically investigate the regime close to the many-body localization transition in quasiperiodic systems. We find slow relaxation of the density imbalanc…
In two recent papers exact Hermite-Gaussian solutions to relativistic wave equations have been obtained for both electromagnetic and particle beams that include Gouy phase. The solutions for particle beams correspond to those of the Schrödinger equation in the non-relativistic limit. Here, distinct canonical and kinetic 4-momentum operators will be defined for quantum particles in matter wave beams. The kinetic momentum is equal to the canonical momentum minus the fluctuating terms resulting from the transverse localization of the beam. Three results are obtained. First, the total energy of a …
We study the non-equilibrium evolution of a one-dimensional quantum Ising chain with spatially disordered, time-dependent, transverse fields characterised by white noise correlation dynamics. We establish pre-thermalization in this model, showing that the quench dynamics of the on-site transverse magnetisation first approaches a metastable state unaffected by noise fluctuations, and then relaxes exponentially fast towards an infinite temperature state as a result of the noise. We also consider energy transport in the model, starting from an inhomogeneous state with two domain walls which separ…
We put forward an experimental configuration to observe transverse Anderson localization of partially coherent light beams with a tunable degree of first-order coherence. The scheme makes use of entangled photons propagating in disordered waveguide arrays, and is based on the unique relationship between the degree of entanglement of a pair of photons and the coherence properties of the individual photons constituting the pair. The scheme can be readily implemented with current waveguide-on-a-chip technology, and surprisingly, the tunability of the coherence properties of the individual photons…
We analyze the unusual slow dynamics that emerges in the bad metal delocalized phase preceding the Many-Body Localization transition by using single-particle Anderson Localization on the Bethe lattice as a toy model of many-body dynamics in Fock space. We probe the dynamical evolution by measuring observables such as the imbalance and equilibrium correlation functions, which display slow dynamics and power-laws strikingly similar to the ones observed in recent simulations and experiments. We relate this unusual behavior to the non-ergodic spectral statistics found on Bethe lattices. We discuss…
In a many-body localized (MBL) quantum system, the ergodic hypothesis breaks down completely, giving rise to a fundamentally new many-body phase. Whether and under which conditions MBL can occur in higher dimensions remains an outstanding challenge both for experiments and theory. Here, we experimentally explore the relaxation dynamics of an interacting gas of fermionic potassium atoms loaded in a two-dimensional optical lattice with different quasi-periodic potentials along the two directions. We observe a dramatic slowing down of the relaxation for intermediate disorder strengths and attribu…
We show that finite systems with conical intersections can exhibit spontaneous symmetry breaking which manifests itself in spatial localization of eigenstates. This localization has a geometric phase origin and is robust against variation of model parameters. The transition between localized and delocalized eigenstate regimes resembles a continuous phase transition. The localization slows down the low-energy quantum nuclear dynamics at zero and low temperatures.
We analyze a one-dimensional XXZ spin chain in a disordered magnetic field. As the main probes of the system's behavior we use the sensitivity of eigenstates to adiabatic transformations, as expressed through the fidelity susceptibility, in conjunction with the low frequency asymptotes of the spectral function. We identify a region of maximal chaos -- with exponentially enhanced susceptibility -- which separates the many-body localized phase from the diffusive ergodic phase. This regime is characterized by slow transport and we argue that the presence of such slow dynamics is incompatible with…
Light transport in a disordered ensemble of resonant atoms placed in a waveguide is found to be very sensitive to the sizes of cross section of a waveguide. Based on self-consistent quantum microscopic model treating atoms as coherent radiating dipoles, we have shown that the nature of radiation transfer changes from Anderson localization regime in a single-mode waveguide to a traditional diffuse transfer in a multi-mode one. Moreover, the transmittance magnitude undergoes complex step-like dependence on the transverse sizes of a waveguide.
We investigate electromagnetically induced transparencies with two transverse Bose-Einstein condensates in four-mirror optical cavity, driven by a strong pump laser and a weak probe laser. The cavity mode, after getting split from beam splitter, interacts with two independent Bose-Einstein Condensates transversely trapped in the arms of the cavity along $x$-axis and $y$-axis. The interaction of intra-cavity optical mode excites momentum side modes in Bose-Einstein Condensates, which then mimic as two atomic mirrors coupled through cavity field. We show that the probe field photons transition t…
We study the real-time dynamics of a quantum Ising chain driven periodically by instantaneous quenches of the transverse field (the transverse field varying as rectangular wave symmetric about zero). Two interesting phenomena are reported and analyzed: (1) We observe dynamical many-body freezing or DMF (Phys. Rev. B, vol. 82, 172402, 2010), i.e. strongly non-monotonic freezing of the response (transverse magnetization) with respect to the driving parameters (pulse width and height) resulting from equivocal freezing behavior of all the many-body modes. The freezing occurs due to coherent suppre…
It is typically assumed that disorder is essential to realize Anderson localization. Recently, a number of proposals have suggested that an interacting, translation invariant system can also exhibit localization. We examine these claims in the context of a one-dimensional spin ladder. At intermediate time scales, we find slow growth of entanglement entropy consistent with the phenomenology of many-body localization. However, at longer times, all finite wavelength spin polarizations decay in a finite time, independent of system size. We identify a single length scale which parametrically contro…
