Hidden free energy released by explicit parity-time-symmetry breaking

TL;DR

This paper reveals that explicit parity-time symmetry breaking through viscosity can destabilize conservative systems, exposing hidden free energies and leading to instability, which has implications for understanding complex system behaviors.

Contribution

It demonstrates that viscosity-induced explicit PT-symmetry breaking can destabilize systems previously stable under conservative conditions, uncovering hidden free energies.

Findings

Viscosity can destabilize PT-symmetric systems.

Explicit PT-symmetry breaking exposes hidden free energies.

Destabilization leads to system instability and variation growth.

Abstract

It is shown that the familiar two-stream instability is the result of spontaneous parity-time (PT)-symmetry breaking in a conservative system, and more importantly, explicit PT-symmetry breaking by viscosity can destabilize the system in certain parameter regimes that are stable when viscosity vanishes. This reveals that complex systems may possess hidden free energies protected by PT-symmetry and viscosity, albeit dissipative, can expose the systems to these freed energies by breaking PT-symmetry explicitly. Such a process is accompanied by instability and total variation growth.