Spontaneous Parity-Time Symmetry Breaking in Moving Media

Abstract

Optical instabilities in moving media are linked to a spontaneous parity-time symmetry breaking of the system. It is shown that in general the time evolution of the electromagnetic waves in moving media is determined by a non-Hermitian parity-time symmetric operator. For lossless systems the frequency spectrum of the time evolution operator may be complex valued, and has a mirror symmetry with respect to the real-frequency axis. The possibility of optical amplification of a light pulse in the broken parity-time symmetry regime is demonstrated.

38 pages

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Cited by in corpus (17)

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• Topological Angular Momentum and Radiative Heat Transport in Closed Orbits
• Revisiting the Abraham-Minkowski Dilemma
• Wave Instabilities and Unidirectional Light Flow in a Cavity with Rotating Walls
• Non-Reciprocal Hyperbolic Propagation over Moving Metasurfaces
• Asymmetric Transmission and Isolation in Nonlinear Devices: Why They Are Different
• PT-symmetric spectral singularity and negative frequency resonance
• Asymmetry-driven plasmon instabilities in confined hydrodynamic electron flows
• Perturbation theory for two-dimensional hydrodynamic plasmons
• Non-Hermiticity-Induced Wave Confinement and Guiding in Loss-Gain-Loss Three-Layer Systems
• Analysis of Metallic Space-Time Gratings using Lorentz Transformations
• Nonlinear Zel'dovich effect: Parametric amplification from medium rotation
• Stable-to-unstable transition in quantum friction
• Spontaneous Rotational Symmetry Breaking in a Kramers Two-Level System
• Three-level Λ-type atomic systems with a Pseudo-Hermitian PT-symmetric Hamiltonian