1 research outputs found
Optical computing of quantum revivals
Interference is the mechanism through which waves can be structured into the
most fascinating patterns. While for sensing, imaging, trapping, or in
fundamental investigations, structured waves play nowadays an important role
and are becoming subject of many interesting studies. Using a coherent optical
field as a probe, we show how to structure light into distributions presenting
collapse and revival structures in its wavefront. These distributions are
obtained from the Fourier spectrum of an arrangement of aperiodic diffracting
structures. Interestingly, the resulting interference may present quasiperiodic
structures of diffraction peaks on a number of distance scales, even though the
diffracting structure is not periodic. We establish an analogy with revival
phenomena in the evolution of quantum mechanical systems and illustrate this
computation numerically and experimentally, obtaining excellent agreement with
the proposed theory.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figure