Asymmetric Transmission Through a Classical Analogue of the Aharonov-Bohm Ring

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates asymmetric wave transmission in a classical microwave analogue of an Aharonov-Bohm ring, showing how lossy features and time delay asymmetries can produce nonreciprocal transmission, with potential implications for quantum and classical wave systems.

Contribution

It introduces a classical microwave ring-graph device with engineered asymmetry and losses, experimentally and numerically demonstrating asymmetric transmission akin to quantum dephasing effects.

Findings

Asymmetric transmission observed in microwave experiments.

Loss and delay asymmetries produce nonreciprocal wave transport.

Results align with models of dephasing-induced transport asymmetry.

Abstract

It has been predicted that new physics and technology are enabled for quantum systems that suffer from partial decoherence, in the intermediate range between coherent quantum evolution and incoherent classical physics. We explore the asymmetric transmission through a classical analogue of the Aharonov-Bohm (AB) mesoscopic ring that supports a 3:1 asymmetry in transmission times, augmented with lossy features that act preferentially on the longer-lingering waves. Such a device is realized as a linear microwave graph utilizing a gyrator to create the 3:1 transmission time delay asymmetry, along with both homogeneous and localized losses, to produce an imbalance in wave transmission through the device. We demonstrate asymmetric transmission through the microwave-ring graph as a function of loss in both simulation and experiment, and in both the frequency- and time-domain. The microwave ring-graph results are compared to a numerical simulation representative of a class of recent models proposing dephasing-induced transport asymmetry in few-channel quantum systems, and parallels are noted.