Fidelity and fidelity susceptibility of pulses in dispersive media

Abstract

Motivated by the growing importance of the fidelity and fidelity susceptibility (FS) in quantum critical phenomena, we use these concepts to describe the pulse propagation inside the dispersive media. It is found that there is a dramatic change in the fidelity and the FS of the pulse at a critical propagation distance inside a dispersive medium, and whether such a dramatic change for a light pulse occurs or not strongly depends on both the dispersive strength of the media and the pulse property. We study in detail about the changes in the fidelity and the FS for both a smooth and a truncated Gaussian pulse through the abnormal and normal dispersive media, where the group velocities are well defined. Our results show that both the fidelity and the FS could be very useful to determine whether the pulse is completely distorted or not at the critical distance; therefore it would be very helpful to find the maximal effective propagation region of the pulse's group velocity, in terms of the changes in the pulse's fidelity and FS.