English

Fractal energy carpets in non-Hermitian Hofstadter quantum mechanics

Statistical Mechanics 2015-10-14 v1 High Energy Physics - Lattice High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

We study the non-Hermitian Hofstadter dynamics of a quantum particle with biased motion on a square lattice in the background of a magnetic field. We show that in quasi-momentum space the energy spectrum is an overlap of infinitely many inequivalent fractals. The energy levels in each fractal are space-filling curves with Hausdorff dimension 2. The band structure of the spectrum is similar to a fractal spider net in contrast to the Hofstadter butterfly for unbiased motion.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1504.02269,
  title  = {Fractal energy carpets in non-Hermitian Hofstadter quantum mechanics},
  author = {M. N. Chernodub and Stephane Ouvry},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1504.02269},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

12 pages, 18 figures. Fractal properties of the energy levels are visualised in the supplementary video material https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODS3QVkPTPE