Symmetric Double-well Potential Research Articles

TBA equations and exact WKB analysis in deformed supersymmetric quantum mechanics

We study the spectral problem in deformed supersymmetric quantum mechanics with polynomial superpotential by using the exact WKB method and the TBA equations. We apply the ODE/IM correspondence to the Schrödinger equation with an effective potential deformed by integrating out the fermions, which admits a continuous deformation parameter. We find that the TBA equations are described by the ℤ4-extended ones. For cubic superpotential corresponding to the symmetric double-well potential, the TBA system splits into the two D3-type TBA equations. We investigate in detail this example based on the TBA equations and their analytic continuation as well as the massless limit. We find that the energy spectrum obtained from the exact quantization condition is in good agreement with the diagonalization approach of the Hamiltonian.

Tunneling effect between radial electric wells in a homogeneous magnetic field

We establish a tunneling formula for a Schrödinger operator with symmetric double-well potential and homogeneous magnetic field, in dimension two. Each well is assumed to be radially symmetric and compactly supported. We obtain an asymptotic formula for the difference between the two first eigenvalues of this operator, that is exponentially small in the semiclassical limit.

Chaos-Assisted Tunneling.

The ability of particles to "tunnel" through potential energy barriers is a purely quantum phenomenon. A classical particle in a symmetric double-well potential, with energy below the potential barrier, will be trapped on one side of the potential well. A quantum particle, however, can sit on both sides, in either a symmetric state or an antisymmetric state. An analogous phenomenon occurs in conservative classical systems with two degrees of freedom and no potential barriers. If only the energy is conserved, the phase space will be a mixture of regular "islands" embedded in a sea of chaos. Classically, a particle sitting in one regular island cannot reach another symmetrically located regular island when the islands are separated by chaos. However, a quantum particle can sit on both regular islands, in symmetric and antisymmetric states, due to chaos-assisted tunneling. Here, we give an overview of the theory and recent experimental observations of this phenomenon.

Tunneling times of an electron in one-dimensional symmetric and asymmetric harmonic double-well potentials

Tunneling times of an electron in one-dimensional symmetric and asymmetric harmonic double-well potentials

Well-posedness and stationary solutions of McKean-Vlasov (S)PDEs

This paper is composed of two parts. In the first part we consider McKean-Vlasov Partial Differential Equations (PDEs), obtained as thermodynamic limits of interacting particle systems (i.e. in the limit N→∞, where N is the number of particles). It is well-known that, even when the particle system has a unique invariant measure (stationary solution), the limiting PDE very often displays a phase transition: for certain choices of (coefficients and) parameter values, the PDE has a unique stationary solution, but as the value of the parameter varies multiple stationary states appear. In the first part of this paper, we add to this stream of literature and consider a specific instance of a McKean-Vlasov type equation, namely the Kuramoto model on the torus perturbed by a symmetric double-well potential, and show that this PDE undergoes the type of phase transition just described, as the diffusion coefficient is varied. In the second part of the paper, we consider a rather general class of McKean-Vlasov PDEs on the torus (which includes both the original Kuramoto model and the Kuramoto model in double well potential of part one) perturbed by (strong enough) infinite-dimensional additive noise. To the best of our knowledge, the resulting Stochastic PDE, which we refer to as the Stochastic McKean-Vlasov equation, has not been studied before, so we first study its well-posedness. We then show that the addition of noise to the PDE has the effect of restoring uniqueness of the stationary state in the sense that, irrespective of the choice of coefficients and parameter values in the McKean-Vlasov PDE, the Stochastic McKean-Vlasov PDE always admits at most one invariant measure.

Data augmentation-based statistical inference of diffusion processes.

The identification of diffusion processes is challenging for many real-world systems with sparsely sampled observation data. In this work, we propose a data augmentation-based sparse Bayesian learning method to identify a class of diffusion processes from sparsely sampled data. We impute latent unsampled diffusion paths between adjacent observations and construct a candidate model for the diffusion processes with the sparsity-inducing prior on model parameters. Given the augmented data and candidate model, we investigate the full joint posterior distribution of all the parameters and latent diffusion paths under a Bayesian learning framework. We then design a Markov chain Monte Carlo sampler with non-degenerate acceptance probability on system dimension to draw samples from the posterior distribution to estimate the parameters and latent diffusion paths. Particularly, the proposed method can handle sparse data that are regularly or irregularly sampled in time. Simulations on the well-known Langevin equation, homogeneous diffusion in a symmetric double-well potential, and stochastic Lotka-Volterra equation demonstrate the effectiveness and considerable accuracy of the proposed method.

Variation in nonadiabaticity and dual fluorescence causality by extension with aromatic rings in tropolone

Photophysical aspects of tropolone upon extension with aromatic rings are studied theoretically. Tropolone possesses three energetically close lying singlet excited states (S 1 (1 π π ∗ ), S 2 (2 π π ∗ ) and S 3 (1 n π ∗ )), resulting in a rapid internal conversion among these states upon photoexcitation. The excited-state energetics and decay dynamics of benzotropolone are similar to the tropolone molecule. On the other hand, upon extending the tropolone with naphthalene moiety (naphthatropolone), the molecule exhibits relatively well-separated electronic states, thus displaying significantly slower photorelaxation compared to the tropolone molecule. Both benzotropolone and naphthatropolone exhibit the dual emission feature, which is absent in the parent tropolone due to the symmetrical double-well potential of S 1 . • Loss of near-degeneracy upon ring extension in tropolone. • Competing nonadiabatic relaxation and ESIPT. • O-H vibrations facilitates rapid internal conversion. • Dual emission features in extended tropolones.

Dynamics of Bose-Einstein condensation in an asymmetric double-well potential

Josephson effect of Bose-Einstein condensate in double-well potential is an obvious manifestation of macroscopic quantum coherence. Most of researches focus on the symmetric double-well potential. In this work, we investigate the dynamic of Bose-Einstein condensates in an asymmetric double-well potential by using two-mode theory and computer simulation. In the absence of the interaction between atoms, the dynamic equation of condensate can be solved analytically. The amplitude as a function of energy difference of two wells is obtained. We can find that the change of energy difference will lead to the different dynamic behaviors of condensate. If the energy difference is relatively large, the condensate will primarily occupy the well that is occupied more than the other well at the beginning time. It is interesting that such a trap phenomenon is not dependent on the position of the high energy potential well nor the position of low energy potential well. If the energy difference becomes small, the tunneling and oscillation of condensate will be enhanced. When the interaction between atoms is present, our numerical calculations show that as the nonlinear interaction increases, the dynamic behavior of condensate exhibits different characteristics, such as trapping in a well, enhancing the tunneling and oscillation between two wells, and enhancing the trapping in a well at large nonlinear interaction, which is similar to the dynamic change caused by the energy difference in the case of ideal condensate. That is to say, on the one hand, the nonlinear interaction can lead to the trap of condensate as well as the dynamic trap to happen in symmetric double-well potential. On the other hand, the nonlinearity can promote the tunneling of condensate, counteracting the effect of the asymmetry of potential. And, this counteracting effect is related to the difference in energy between asymmetric potential wells. To understand the underlying mechanism, the full dynamic behavior of two-mode model is illustrated and the dynamic transition can be seen clearly. Combining the results obtained with and without interaction, regarding nonlinear interaction as effective potential provides a clear way to explain dynamic transition of condensate in an asymmetric double-well potential. In addition, we also perform the numerical simulations of the Gross-Pitaevskii equation, and the results are consistent with the conclusions obtained by using the two-mode theory.

Effective potentials in a rotating spin-orbit-coupled spin-1 spinor condensate

We theoretically study the stationary-state vortex lattice configurations of rotating spin-orbit (SO)- and coherently-coupled spin-1 Bose–Einstein condensates (BECs) trapped in quasi-two-dimensional harmonic potentials. The combined effects of rotation, SO and coherent couplings are analyzed systematically from the single-particle perspective. Through the single-particle Hamiltonian, which is exactly solvable for one-dimensional coupling, we illustrate that a boson in these rotating SO- and coherently-coupled condensates are subjected to effective toroidal, symmetric double-well, or asymmetric double-well potentials under specific coupling and rotation strengths. In the presence of mean-field interactions, using the coupled Gross–Pitaevskii formalism at moderate to high rotation frequencies, the analytically obtained effective potential minima and the numerically obtained coarse-grained density maxima position are in excellent agreement. On rapid rotation, we further find that the spin-expectation per particle of an antiferromagnetic spin-1 BEC approaches unity indicating a similarity in the response with ferromagnetic SO-coupled condensates.

Quest for eternal oscillons

Nonlinear field theories produce unstable but long-lived configurations known as oscillons. These structures have been studied with asymmetric and symmetric double-well potentials and extended to other forms of potentials. In the present work, we examine the consequences of considering higher-order field theories, where we have used a generalization of the symmetric double-well potential and a $\phi^6$ potential. Consequently, we have found $3+1$ spherically symmetric oscillons with significantly large lifetimes without parameter fine-tuning.

Rotating Minimal Thermodynamic Systems.

Minimal rotating thermodynamic systems are addressed. Particle m placed into the rotating symmetrical double-well potential (bowl), providing binary logical system is considered. The condition providing the transfer of the particle from one frictionless half-well to another, and, in this way, the possibility to record 1 bit of information is derived. The procedure of recording turns out to be irreversible; it is impossible to return the particle to its initial state under rotation about the same axis. The same rotating double-well system exerted to the thermal noise is considered. A minimal rotating thermal engine built of the rotating chamber, movable partition, and the particle confined within the chamber is treated. Rotation of the system displaces the partition, thus enabling erasing of one bit information. Erasing of 1 bit of information is due to the inertia (centrifugal force) acting on the partition. Isothermal expansion of the “minimal gas” expectedly gives rise to the Landauer bound. Compression of the “gas” with the rotation around the same axis is impossible and demands the additional axis of rotation. The interrelation between the possibility of recording/erasing information and the symmetry of the system is considered.

Control of spin waves by spatially modulated strain

We suggest using spatially modulated strain for control of a spin wave propagating inside a bulk magnet. The modulation with the wave vector $q=2k$, by virtue of magnetoelasticity, mixes spin waves with wave vectors near $k$ and $-k$. This leads to lifting the degeneracy of the symmetric and antisymmetric eigenstate combinations of these waves. The resulting picture reminds one of a tunneling particle in a symmetric double-well potential. Here, a moving spin wave being subjected to the $2k$-lattice modulation after some time alters its propagation direction to the opposite one, and so on. The effect can be utilized for the control of the spin-wave propagation that can be useful for spintronic and magnonic applications. The control may include a delay line element, filtering, and waveguide of the spin waves.

Interaction-modulated tunneling dynamics of a mixture of Bose-Fermi superfluid

In this paper, we study the interaction-modulated tunneling dynamics of a Bose-Fermi superfluid mixture, where a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) with weak repulsive interaction is confined in a symmetric deep double-well potential and an equally populated two-component Fermi gas in a harmonic potential symmetrically is positioned in the center of the double-well potential. The tunneling between the two wells is modulated by fermions trapped in a harmonic potential. When the temperature is adequately low and the bosonic particle number is adequately large, we can employ the mean-field theory to describe the evolution of the BEC in the double-well potential through the time-dependent Gross-Pitaevskii equation. For the Fermi gas in the harmonic potential trap, we consider the case where the inter-fermion interaction is tuned on the deep Bose-Einstein condensate of the inter-fermion Feshbach resonance, where two fermions of spin-up and spin-down form a two-body bound state. Within the regime, the Fermi gas is well described by a condensate of these fermionic dimers, and hence can be simulated as well by a Gross-Pitaevskii equation of dimers. The inter-species interactions couple the dynamics of the two species, which results in interesting features in the tunneling oscillations. The dynamic equations of the BEC in the double-well potential is described by a two-mode approximation. Coupling it with time-dependent Gross-Pitaevskii equation of the harmonically potential trapped molecular BEC, we numerically investigate the dynamical evolution of the Boson-Fermi hybrid system under different initial conditions. It is found that the interaction among fermions in a harmonic potential leads to strong non-linearity in the oscillations of the bosons in the double-well potential and enriches the tunneling dynamics of the bosons. Especially, it strengthens macroscopic quantum self-trapping. And the macroscopic quantum self-trapping can be expressed in three forms: the phase tends to be negative and monotonically decreases with time, the phase evolves with time, and the phase tends to be positive and increases monotonically with time. This means that it is possible the tunneling dynamics of the BEC in double-well potential is adjustable. Our results can be verified experimentally in a Bose-Fermi superfluid mixture by varying different interaction parameters via Feshbach resonance and confinement-induced resonance.

Electron transport properties of molecular junctions with anharmonic double-well potentials

In the present paper, we investigated the electron transport properties of molecular junctions with anharmonic vibrations described by double-well potentials in the sequential tunneling regime. It was found that the suppression of the low-bias current caused by strong electron-vibration couplings under harmonic approximation, i.e., the Franck-Condon blockade effect, could be lifted in the case of symmetric double-well potentials. The removal of the Franck-Condon blockade effect is a result of the distribution of the ground vibrational wave function in the two wells. Such a feature also enables the Franck-Condon blockade effect to be restored by breaking the symmetry of the double-well potential. We further demonstrated that the special vibrational transition properties of asymmetric double-well potentials could enable the effective modulation of the charge transport properties of such molecular junctions in the Franck-Condon blockade region by inducing population in excited vibrational levels with external fields such as infrared excitation.

The Hartree functional in a double well

We consider a non-linear Hartree energy for bosonic particles in a symmetric double-well potential. In the limit where the wells are far apart and the potential barrier is high, we prove that the ground state and first excited state are given to leading order by an even, respectively odd, superposition of ground states in single wells. The corresponding energies are separated by a small tunneling term that we evaluate precisely.

Towards a symmetric reversible single-molecule switch: Amino-imino-cyclo-n-enes

We propose cyclic 5- and 7-ring structures with alternating single and double bonds and adjacent imino and amino groups as candidates for switches in molecular electronics, with amino-imino tautomerisation as the switching mechanism. Due to the C2V-symmetric transition state, the molecules exhibit a symmetric double-well potential with identical energies for the two states, which is a desirable property for a functioning molecular switch. Calculations at the double hybrid mPW2PLYP-D2/def2-TZVP level show barriers of 1.07 and 0.52 eV for the 5-ring and 7-ring, respectively (zero-point corrected: 0.97 and 0.41 eV, respectively). The corresponding 9-ring structure is not suitable as a molecular switch, due to ring puckering and the existence of multiple minima. Attachment of ethyne groups to the nitrogens and the opposite carbon, as models for molecular wires, only slightly changes the barrier heights. The 5- and 7-ring structures are promising switch candidates for further investigation.

NOON states with ultracold bosonic atoms via resonance- and chaos-assisted tunneling

We theoretically investigate the generation of microscopic atomic NOON states, corresponding to the coherent |N,0> + |0,N> superposition with N ~ 5 particles, via collective tunneling of interacting ultracold bosonic atoms within a symmetric double-well potential in the self-trapping regime. We show that a periodic driving of the double well with suitably tuned amplitude and frequency parameters allows one to substantially boost this tunneling process without altering its collective character. The time scale to generate the NOON superposition, which corresponds to half the tunneling time and would be prohibitively large in the undriven double well for the considered atomic populations, can thereby be drastically reduced, which renders the realization of NOON states through this protocol experimentally feasible. Resonance- and chaos-assisted tunneling are identified as key mechanisms in this context. A quantitative semiclassical evaluation of their impact onto the collective tunneling process allows one to determine the optimal choice for the driving parameters in order to generate those NOON states as fast as possible.

Impact of the transverse direction on the many-body tunneling dynamics in a two-dimensional bosonic Josephson junction

Tunneling in a many-body system appears as one of the novel implications of quantum physics, in which particles move in space under an otherwise classically-forbidden potential barrier. Here, we theoretically describe the quantum dynamics of the tunneling phenomenon of a few intricate bosonic clouds in a closed system of a two-dimensional symmetric double-well potential. We examine how the inclusion of the transverse direction, orthogonal to the junction of the double-well, can intervene in the tunneling dynamics of bosonic clouds. We use a well-known many-body numerical method, called the multiconfigurational time-dependent Hartree for bosons (MCTDHB) method. MCTDHB allows one to obtain accurately the time-dependent many-particle wavefunction of the bosons which in principle entails all the information of interest about the system under investigation. We analyze the tunneling dynamics by preparing the initial state of the bosonic clouds in the left well of the double-well either as the ground, longitudinally or transversely excited, or a vortex state. We unravel the detailed mechanism of the tunneling process by analyzing the evolution in time of the survival probability, depletion and fragmentation, and the many-particle position, momentum, and angular-momentum expectation values and their variances. As a general rule, all objects lose coherence while tunneling through the barrier and the states which include transverse excitations do so faster. In particular for the later states, we show that even when the transverse direction is seemingly frozen, prominent many-body dynamics in a two-dimensional bosonic Josephson junction occurs. Implications are briefly discussed.

Does nuclear permutation symmetry allow dynamical localization in symmetric double-well achiral molecules?

We discuss the effect of molecular symmetry on coherent tunneling in symmetric double-well potentials whose two molecular equilibrium configurations are interconverted by nuclear permutations. This is illustrated with vibrational tunneling in ammonia molecules, electronic tunneling in the dihydrogen cation, and laser-induced rotational tunneling of homonuclear diatomics. In this contribution, we reexamine the textbook picture of coherent tunneling in such potentials, which is depicted with a wavepacket shuttling back and forth between the two potential-wells. We show that the common application of this picture to the aforementioned molecules contravenes the principle of the indistinguishability of identical particles. This conflict originates from the sole consideration of the dynamics of the tunneling-mode, connecting the double-well energy minima, and complete omission of all the remaining molecular degrees of freedom. This gives rise to double-well wavepackets that are nonsymmetric under nuclear permutations. To obey quantum statistics, we show that the double-well eigenstates composing these wavepackets must be entangled with the wavefunctions that describe all the omitted molecular modes. These wavefunctions have compensating and opposite nuclear permutation symmetry. This in turn leads to complete quenching of interference effects behind localization in one potential-well or another. Indeed, we demonstrate that the reduced density of probability of the symmetrized molecular wavefunction, where all the molecular coordinates but the tunneling-mode are integrated out, is symmetrically distributed over the two potential-wells, at all times. This applies to any multilevel wavepacket of isotropic or fully aligned symmetric double-well achiral molecules. However, in the case of coherent electronic or vibrational tunneling, fully aligned molecules may exhibit dynamical localization in the space-fixed frame, where the tunneling-mode density shuttles between the opposite directions of the alignment axis. This dynamical spatial-localization results from linear combinations of molecular states that have opposite parity. In summary, this study shows that dynamical localization of the tunneling-mode density on either of the two indistinguishable molecular equilibrium configurations of symmetric double-well achiral molecules is forbidden by quantum statistics, whereas its dynamical localization in the space-fixed frame is allowed by parity. The subtle distinction between these two types of localization has far-reaching implications in the interpretation of many ultrafast molecular dynamics experiments.

Reply to “Comment on ‘Ultrafast polarization switching in ferroelectrics' ”

Recently, a method of ultrafast polarization switching in ferroelectrics has been suggested. The basic idea of the method is to employ the effect of self-acceleration of polarization dynamics due to a resonator feedback field. This is the idea of principle whose efficiency is demonstrated by an Ising-type model in a transverse field. Of course, the practical realization of the method requires the choice of appropriate materials, which is a separate problem. For example, the standard order-disorder ferroelectrics with spatially symmetric double-well potentials cannot be used for this purpose since, because of the symmetry, they lack the transverse polarization. However, ferroelectrics with asymmetric potentials, possessing this polarization, can be used. Moreover, if the potential asymmetry, hence, the transverse polarization, could be regulated, e.g., by shear stress or shear strain, this could provide a tool for governing the process of polarization switching.