Schrodinger's Hat: Electromagnetic, acoustic and quantum amplifiers via transformation optics

TL;DR

This paper presents theoretical designs for 'Schrödinger hats' that act as invisible wave concentrators across electromagnetic, acoustic, and quantum domains, enabling new wave manipulation effects and quasiparticle creation.

Contribution

It introduces a new class of wave-manipulating devices called Schrödinger hats, extending transformation optics to create invisible wave concentrators for various wave phenomena.

Findings

Designs for electromagnetic, acoustic, and quantum Schrödinger hats.

Existence of localized wave excitations and quasiparticles.

Potential solid state implementations discussed.

Abstract

The advent of transformation optics and metamaterials has made possible devices producing extreme effects on wave propagation. Here we give theoretical designs for devices, Schr\"odinger hats, acting as invisible concentrators of waves. These exist for any wave phenomenon modeled by either the Helmholtz or Schr\"odinger equations, e.g., polarized waves in EM, pressure waves in acoustics and matter waves in QM, and occupy one part of a parameter space continuum of wave-manipulating structures which also contains standard transformation optics based cloaks, resonant cloaks and cloaked sensors. For EM and acoustic Schr\"odinger hats, the resulting centralized wave is a localized excitation. In QM, the result is a new charged quasiparticle, a \emph{quasmon}, which causes conditional probabilistic illusions. We discuss possible solid state implementations.