English

Towards a quantum time mirror for nonrelativistic wave packets

Quantum Physics 2018-05-28 v2 Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics

Abstract

We propose a method -- a quantum time mirror (QTM) -- for simulating a partial time-reversal of the free-space motion of a nonrelativistic quantum wave packet. The method is based on a short-time spatially-homogeneous perturbation to the wave packet dynamics, achieved by adding a nonlinear time-dependent term to the underlying Schr\"odinger equation. Numerical calculations, supporting our analytical considerations, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed QTM for generating a time-reversed echo image of initially localized matter-wave packets in one and two spatial dimensions. We also discuss possible experimental realizations of the proposed QTM.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1801.01818,
  title  = {Towards a quantum time mirror for nonrelativistic wave packets},
  author = {Phillipp Reck and Cosimo Gorini and Arseni Goussev and Viktor Krueckl and Mathias Fink and Klaus Richter},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1801.01818},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

10 pages, 3 figures. This article supersedes the second half of arXiv:1603.07503v1, which we decided to split into two separate papers; one being arXiv1603.07503v2 the other one being the one at hand (arXiv:1801.01818). v2: adjusted references [36] and [37] which are now displayed correctly

R2 v1 2026-06-22T23:37:34.596Z