arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to I. M. Sokolov.
We analyze the transport properties of quasiparticles locally excited at an initial time moment in several exactly solvable quantum models. It is revealed that, in the investigated quantum systems, the time-dependent probability distribution function (PDF) exhibits behavior similar to that of classical continuous-time random walk (CTRW) models, such as Lévy walks or diffusing diffusivity.
Based on a consistent quantum microscopic approach, we investigate the peculiarities of collective polyatomic effects in atomic ensembles placed in a waveguide, caused by the presence of evanescent modes of electromagnetic field. We analyze the influence of these modes on the process of cooperative spontaneous decay, as well as on the nature of radiation transfer in the ensembles under consideration. We show that under certain conditions, their influence can be dominant compared to the role of radiation modes, and the mechanism for this influence is the modification of dipole-dipole interatomic interaction.
A solid transparent medium with randomly positioned, immobile impurity atoms is a promising candidate for observation of Anderson localization of light in three dimensions. It can have low losses and allows for mitigation of the detrimental effect of longitudinal optical fields by an external magnetic field, but it has its own issues: thermal oscillations of atoms around their equilibrium positions and inhomogeneous broadening of atomic spectral lines due to random local electric fields. Our calculations suggest that these complications should not impede observation of Anderson localization of light in such materials provided that sufficiently high number densities of impurities can be reached. The thermal oscillations hardly affect light propagation whereas the inhomogeneous broadening can be compensated for by increasing the number density of impurities.
We have discovered abnormally strong influence of the magnetic field on the optical properties of atomic ensemble confined in a waveguide. We demonstrate qualitative changes in the character of spontaneous emission and single-atom susceptibility. Based on the revealed effects, we propose a new scheme of true single photon source. Furthermore, we propose the highly-efficient optical gate using just one atom.
We report the investigation of the influence of atomic motion on the fluorescence dynamics of dilute atomic ensemble driven by resonant pulse radiation. We show that even for sub-Doppler temperatures, the motion of atoms can significantly affect the nature of both superradiation and subradiation. We also demonstrate that, in the case of an ensemble of moving scatterers, it is possible to observe the nonmonotonic time dependence of the fluorescence rate. This leads to the fact that, in certain time intervals, increasing in temperature causes not an decrease but increase of the fluorescence intensity in the cone of coherent scattering. We have analyzed the role of the frequency diffusion of secondary radiation as a result of multiple light scattering in an optically dense medium. It is shown that spectrum broadening is the main factor which determines radiation trapping upon resonant excitation. At later time, after the trapping stage, the dynamics is dominated by close pairs of atoms (dimers). The dynamics of the excited states of these dimers has been studied in detail. It is shown that the change in the lifetime of the given adiabatic term of the diatomic quasi-molecule induced by the change in the interatomic distance as well as possible non-adiabatic transitions between sub- and superradiant states caused by atomic motion can lead not to the anticipated weakening of subradiation effect but to its enhancement.
We study numerically the slow (subradiant) decay of the fluorescence of motionless atoms after a weak pulsed excitation. We show that, in the linear-optics regime and for an excitation detuned by several natural linewidths, the slow decay rate can be dominated by close pairs of atoms (dimers) forming superradiant and subradiant states. However, for a large-enough resonant optical depth and at later time, the dynamics is dominated by collective many-body effects. In this regime, we study the polarization and the spectrum of the emitted light, as well as the spatial distribution of excitation inside the sample, as a function of time during the decay dynamics. The behavior of these observables is consistent with what would be expected for radiation trapping of nearly resonant light. This finding sheds light on subradiance in dilute samples by providing an interpretation based on the light behavior of the system (multiple scattering) which is complementary to the more commonly used picture of the collective atomic Dicke state.
Light transport in a disordered ensemble of resonant atoms placed in a waveguide is found to be very sensitive to the sizes of cross section of a waveguide. Based on self-consistent quantum microscopic model treating atoms as coherent radiating dipoles, we have shown that the nature of radiation transfer changes from Anderson localization regime in a single-mode waveguide to a traditional diffuse transfer in a multi-mode one. Moreover, the transmittance magnitude undergoes complex step-like dependence on the transverse sizes of a waveguide.
We present an optical picture of linear-optics superradiance, based on a single scattering event embedded in a dispersive effective medium composed by the other atoms. This linear-dispersion theory is valid at low density and in the single-scattering regime, i.e., when the exciting field is largely detuned. The comparison with the coupled-dipole model shows a perfect agreement for the superradiant decay rate. Then we use two advantages of this approach. First we make a direct comparison with experimental data, without any free parameter, and show a good quantitative agreement. Second, we address the problem of moving atoms, which can be efficiently simulated by adding the Doppler broadening to the theory. In particular, we discuss how to recover superradiance at high temperature.
Generalized (non-Markovian) diffusion equations with different memory kernels and subordination schemes based on random time change in the Brownian diffusion process are popular mathematical tools for description of a variety of non-Fickian diffusion processes in physics, biology and earth sciences. Some of such processes (notably, the fluid limits of continuous time random walks) allow for either kind of description, but other ones do not. In the present work we discuss the conditions under which a generalized diffusion equation does correspond to a subordination scheme, and the conditions under which a subordination scheme does possess the corresponding generalized diffusion equation. Moreover, we discuss examples of random processes for which only one, or both kinds of description are applicable.
We show that the surface tension of fluid near the critical point may be correctly described by taking into consideration the microscopic structure of the system using a ϕ4 field theory. We revise the theory of the surface tension near criticality to take into account a microscopic structure of the fluid. Focusing on the case of the Lennard-Jones fluid, we express the surface tension in terms of the compressibility of the reference hard-core system and its derivatives with respect to density. We demonstrate that the obtained analytical microscopic expression for the surface tension near the critical point is in a good agreement with numerical experiments, which emphasizes the impact of microscopic structure on the critical behavior of the surface tension in fluids. Our analysis provides a basis for studying the surface tension in small-volume systems important in many technological applications.
Spontaneous decay of an excited atom in a waveguide is essentially modified by the spatial structure of vacuum reservoir. This is particularly exciting in view of a range of applications for quantum information science. We found out that spontaneous decay can be incomplete, so the time dependence of the excited state population asymptotically approaches to a nonzero value, under the conditions when the atomic transition frequency is larger than the cutoff frequency of a waveguide and far from the vicinities of the cut-offs. Discovered effect is explained by the emergence of the dark state, which is non-decaying due to polarization selection rules. It was revealed for single-mode waveguide with rectangular cross section both in single-atom case and diatomic case when the long-range dipole-dipole interaction plays a significant role.
We discuss the situations under which Brownian yet non-Gaussian (BnG) diffusion can be observed in the model of a particle's motion in a random landscape of diffusion coefficients slowly varying in space. Our conclusion is that such behavior is extremely unlikely in the situations when the particles, introduced into the system at random at $t=0$, are observed from the preparation of the system on. However, it indeed may arise in the case when the diffusion (as described in Ito interpretation) is observed under equilibrated conditions. This paradigmatic situation can be translated into the model of the diffusion coefficient fluctuating in time along a trajectory, i.e. into a kind of the "diffusing diffusivity" model.
Anderson localization does not lead to an exponential decay of intensity of an incident wave with the depth inside a strongly disordered three-dimensional medium. Instead, the average intensity is roughly constant in the first half of a disordered slab, sharply drops in a narrow region in the middle of the sample, and then remains low in the second half of the sample. A universal, scale-free spatial distribution of average intensity is found at mobility edges where the intensity exhibits strong sample-to-sample fluctuations. Our numerical simulations allow us to discriminate between two competing local diffusion theories of Anderson localization and to pinpoint a deficiency of the self-consistent theory.
We show that atomic motion leads not only to noticeable quantitative, but in some cases also to qualitative modification of collective effects in dense and cold atomic ensembles even in the case when the characteristic Doppler shifts are tens of times smaller than the natural linewidth. The observed influence is explained as a result of the suppression of the impact of sub-radiant collective states caused by the displacement of the atoms.
We demonstrate that the transport of coherent quasiresonant light through a dense cloud of immobile two-level atoms subjected to a static external electric field can be described by a simple diffusion process up to atomic number densities of the order of at least $10^2$ atoms per wavelength cubed. Transport mean free paths well below the wavelength of light in the free space can be reached without inducing any sign of Anderson localization of light or of any other mechanism of breakdown of diffusion.
We explore the potential of a static electric field to induce Anderson localization of light in a large three-dimensional (3D) cloud of randomly distributed, immobile atoms with a degenerate ground state (total angular momentum $J_g = 0$) and a three-fold degenerate excited state ($J_e = 1$). We study both the spatial structure of quasimodes of the atomic cloud and the scaling of the Thouless number with the size of the cloud. Our results indicate that unlike the static magnetic field, the electric field does not induce Anderson localization of light by atoms. We explain this conclusion by the incomplete removal of degeneracy of the excited atomic state by the field and the relatively strong residual dipole-dipole coupling between atoms which is weaker than in the absence of external fields but stronger than in the presence of a static magnetic field. A joint analysis of these results together with our previous results concerning Anderson localization of scalar waves and light suggests the existence of a critical strength of dipole-dipole interactions that should not be surpassed for Anderson localization to be possible in 3D.
Lévy walks represent a class of stochastic models (space-time coupled continuous time random walks) with applications ranging from the laser cooling to the description of animal motion. The initial model was intended for the description of turbulent dispersion as given by the Richardson's law. The existence of this Richardson's regime in the original model was recently challenged in the work by T. Albers and G. Radons, Phys. Rev. Lett. 120, 104501 (2018): the mean squared displacement (MSD) in this model diverges, i.e. does not exist, in the regime, where it presumably should reproduce the Richardson's law. In the supplemental material to this work the authors present (but do not investigate in detail) a generalized model interpolating between the original one and the Drude-like models known to show no divergences. In the present work we give a detailed investigation of the ensemble MSD in this generalized model, show that the behavior of the MSD in this model is the same (up to prefactiors) as in the original one in the domains where the MSD in the original model does exist, and investigate the conditions under which the MSD in the generalized model does exist or diverges. Both ordinary and aged situations are considered.
On the basis of a quantum microscopic approach we study the cooperative effects induced by the dipole-dipole interaction in an ensemble of point-like impurity centers located near a charged perfectly conducting surface. We analyze the simultaneous influence of the modified spatial structure of field modes near the conductive surface and the electric field on the transition spectrum of an excited atom inside an ensemble and on the radiation trapping. We show that the electric field modifies the cooperative Lamb shift, as well as the character of sub- and superradiant decay. We also demonstrate that these modifications differ from those taking place in the case of atomic ensembles in free space, without conducting surface.