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

References in corpus (9)

• Making Sense of Non-Hermitian Hamiltonians
• Fiber-optical analogue of the event horizon
• Rotational Quantum Friction
• Gauge Theories with Cayley-Klein $SO(2;j)$ and $SO(3;j)$ Gauge Groups
• Theory of friction: contribution from fluctuating electromagnetic field
• No quantum friction between uniformly moving plates
• Electron-scale shear instabilities: magnetic field generation and particle acceleration in astrophysical jets
• Canonical quantization of the electromagnetic field interacting with a moving dielectric
• Casimir friction at zero and finite temperatures

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• 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