Optical computing of quantum revivals

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how to structure light into wavefronts exhibiting collapse and revival phenomena, using optical interference patterns derived from aperiodic diffraction structures, with numerical and experimental validation.

Contribution

It introduces a novel optical method to emulate quantum revival phenomena through structured light interference patterns from aperiodic structures.

Findings

Successful numerical simulations of revival patterns

Experimental verification of structured light distributions

Observation of quasiperiodic diffraction peak structures

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 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.