Wave localization in number-theoretic landscapes

Abstract

We investigate the localization of waves in aperiodic structures that manifest the characteristic multiscale complexity of certain arithmetic functions with a central role in number theory. In particular, we study the eigenspectra and wave localization properties of tight-binding Schrödinger equation models with on-site potentials distributed according to the Liouville function $\lambda (n)$, the Möbius function $\mu (n)$, and the Legendre sequence of quadratic residues modulo a prime (QRs). We employ Multifractal Detrended Fluctuation Analysis (MDFA) and establish the multifractal scaling properties of the energy spectra in these systems. Moreover, by systematically analyzing the spatial eigenmodes and their level spacing distributions, we show the absence of level repulsion with broadband localization across the entire energy spectra. Our study introduces deterministic aperiodic systems whose eigenmodes are all strongly localized in realistic finite one-dimensional systems and provides opportunities for novel quantum and classical devices of particular importance to cold-atom experiments in engineered speckle potentials and enhanced light-matter interactions.

References in corpus (4)

• Topological Photonic Quasicrystals: Fractal Topological Spectrum and Protected Transport
• Wave Functions, Quantum Diffusion, and Scaling Exponents in Golden-Mean Quasiperiodic Tilings
• Aperiodic photonics of elliptic curves
• Aperiodic bandgap structures for enhanced quantum two-photon sources