Quantum carpets: efficiently probing fractional revivals in position-dependent mass systems

Abstract

Position-dependent-mass systems are of great importance in many physical situations, such as the transport of charge carriers in semiconductors with non-uniform composition and in the theory of many-body interactions in condensed matter. Here we investigate, numerically and analytically, the phenomenon of fractional revivals in such systems, which is a generic characteristic manifested by the wave-packet evolution in bounded Hamiltonian systems. Identifying the fractional revivals using specific probes is an important task in the theory of quantum measurement and sensing. We numerically simulate the temporal evolution of probability density and information entropy density, which manifest self-similarly recurring interference patterns, namely, quantum carpets. Our numerical results show that the quantum carpets not only serve as an effective probe for recognizing the fractional revivals of various order but they efficiently describe the effect of spatially-varying mass on the structure of fractional revivals, which is manifested as a symmetry breaking in their designs.