Synthetic Anti-PT Symmetry in a Single Microcavity

Fangxing Zhang; Yaming Feng; Xianfeng Chen; Li Ge; Wenjie Wan

doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.124.053901

Synthetic Anti-PT Symmetry in a Single Microcavity

Phys Rev Lett. 2020 Feb 7;124(5):053901. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.124.053901.

Authors

Fangxing Zhang¹, Yaming Feng², Xianfeng Chen², Li Ge³, Wenjie Wan^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ The State Key Laboratory of Advanced Optical Communication Systems and Networks, University of Michigan-Shanghai Jiao Tong University Joint Institute, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China.
² MOE Key Laboratory for Laser Plasmas and Collaborative Innovation Center of IFSA, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China.
³ Department of Physics and Astronomy, College of Staten Island, the City University of New York, NY 10314, and the Graduate Center, CUNY, New York, New York 10016, USA.

PMID: 32083913
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.124.053901

Abstract

Non-Hermitian systems based on parity-time (PT) and anti-PT symmetry reveal rich physics beyond the Hermitian regime. So far, realizations of such symmetric systems have been limited to the spatial domain. Here we theoretically and experimentally demonstrate synthetic anti-PT symmetry in a spectral dimension induced by nonlinear Brillouin scattering in a single optical microcavity, where Brillouin scattering induced transparency or absorption in two spectral resonances provides the optical gain and loss to observe a phase transition between two symmetry regimes. This scheme provides a new paradigm towards the investigation of non-Hermitian physics in a synthetic photonic dimension for all-optical signal processing and quantum information science.