Photorealistic ray tracing of free-space invisibility cloaks made of uniaxial dielectrics

The design rules of transformation optics generally lead to spatially inhomogeneous and anisotropic impedance-matched magneto-dielectric material distributions for, e.g., free-space invisibility cloaks. Recently, simplified anisotropic non-magnetic free-space cloaks made of a locally uniaxial dielectric material (calcite) have been realized experimentally. In a two-dimensional setting and for in-plane polarized light propagating in this plane, the cloaking performance can still be perfect for light rays. However, for general views in three dimensions, various imperfections are expected. In this paper, we study two different purely dielectric uniaxial cylindrical free-space cloaks. For one, the optic axis is along the radial direction, for the other one it is along the azimuthal direction. The azimuthal uniaxial cloak has not been suggested previously to the best of our knowledge. We visualize the cloaking performance of both by calculating photorealistic images rendered by ray tracing. Following and complementing our previous ray-tracing work, we use an equation of motion directly derived from Fermats principle. The rendered images generally exhibit significant imperfections. This includes the obvious fact that cloaking does not work at all for horizontal or for ordinary linear polarization of light. Moreover, more subtle effects occur such as viewing-angle-dependent aberrations. However, we still find amazingly good cloaking performance for the purely dielectric azimuthal uniaxial cloak.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures, journal pape

Probing the anomalous dynamical phase in long-range quantum spin chains through Fisher-zero lines

Using the framework of infinite Matrix Product States, the existence of an \textit{anomalous} dynamical phase for the transverse-field Ising chain with sufficiently long-range interactions was first reported in [J.~C.~Halimeh and V.~Zauner-Stauber, arXiv:1610:02019], where it was shown that \textit{anomalous} cusps arise in the Loschmidt-echo return rate for sufficiently small quenches within the ferromagnetic phase. In this work we further probe the nature of the anomalous phase through calculating the corresponding Fisher-zero lines in the complex time plane. We find that these Fisher-zero lines exhibit a qualitative difference in their behavior, where, unlike in the case of the regular phase, some of them terminate before intersecting the imaginary axis, indicating the existence of smooth peaks in the return rate preceding the cusps. Additionally, we discuss in detail the infinite Matrix Product State time-evolution method used to calculate Fisher zeros and the Loschmidt-echo return rate using the Matrix Product State transfer matrix. Our work sheds further light on the nature of the anomalous phase in the long-range transverse-field Ising chain, while the numerical treatment presented can be applied to more general quantum spin chains.Comment: Journal article. 9 pages and 6 figures. Includes in part what used to be supplemental material in arXiv:1610:0201

Aging dynamics in quenched noisy long-range quantum Ising models

We consider the $d$-dimensional transverse-field Ising model with power-law interactions $J/r^{d+\sigma}$ in the presence of a noisy longitudinal field with zero average. We study the longitudinal-magnetization dynamics of an initial paramagnetic state after a sudden switch-on of both the interactions and the noisy field. While the system eventually relaxes to an infinite-temperature state with vanishing magnetization correlations, we find that two-time correlation functions show aging at intermediate times. Moreover, for times shorter than the inverse noise strength $\kappa$ and distances longer than $a(J/\kappa)^{2/\sigma}$ with $a$ being the lattice spacing, we find a critical scaling regime of correlation and response functions consistent with the model A dynamical universality class with an initial-slip exponent $\theta=1$ and dynamical critical exponent $z=\sigma/2$. We obtain our results analytically by deriving an effective action for the magnetization field including the noise in a non-perturbative way. The above scaling regime is governed by a non-equilibrium fixed point dominated by the noise fluctuations.Comment: Accepted version, 11 pages, 5 figure

Chebyshev matrix product state approach for time evolution

We present and test a new algorithm for time-evolving quantum many-body systems initially proposed by Holzner et al. [Phys. Rev. B 83, 195115 (2011)]. The approach is based on merging the matrix product state (MPS) formalism with the method of expanding the time-evolution operator in Chebyshev polynomials. We calculate time-dependent observables of a system of hardcore bosons quenched under the Bose-Hubbard Hamiltonian on a one-dimensional lattice. We compare the new algorithm to more standard methods using the MPS architecture. We find that the Chebyshev method gives numerically exact results for small times. However, the reachable times are smaller than the ones obtained with the other state-of-the-art methods. We further extend the new method using a spectral-decomposition-based projective scheme that utilizes an effective bandwidth significantly smaller than the full bandwidth, leading to longer evolution times than the non-projective method and more efficient information storage, data compression, and less computational effort.Comment: 14 pages, 8 figure