Gentilini Silvia, Braidotti Maria Chiara, Marcucci Giulia, DelRe Eugenio, Conti Claudio
Institute for Complex Systems, National Research Council, Via dei Taurini 19, 00185 Rome (IT).
Department of Physics, University Sapienza, Piazzale Aldo Moro 5, 00185 Rome (IT).
Sci Rep. 2015 Nov 2;5:15816. doi: 10.1038/srep15816.
More than thirty years ago Glauber suggested that the link between the reversible microscopic and the irreversible macroscopic world can be formulated in physical terms through an inverted harmonic oscillator describing quantum amplifiers. Further theoretical studies have shown that the paradigm for irreversibility is indeed the reversed harmonic oscillator. As outlined by Glauber, providing experimental evidence of these idealized physical systems could open the way to a variety of fundamental studies, for example to simulate irreversible quantum dynamics and explain the arrow of time. However, supporting experimental evidence of reversed quantized oscillators is lacking. We report the direct observation of exploding n = 0 and n = 2 discrete states and Γ0 and Γ2 quantized decay rates of a reversed harmonic oscillator generated by an optical photothermal nonlinearity. Our results give experimental validation to the main prediction of irreversible quantum mechanics, that is, the existence of states with quantized decay rates. Our results also provide a novel perspective to optical shock-waves, potentially useful for applications as lasers, optical amplifiers, white-light and X-ray generation.
三十多年前，格劳伯提出，可逆微观世界与不可逆宏观世界之间的联系可以通过描述量子放大器的倒谐振子以物理术语来表述。进一步的理论研究表明，不可逆性的范式确实是倒谐振子。正如格劳伯所概述的，为这些理想化物理系统提供实验证据可能为各种基础研究开辟道路，例如模拟不可逆量子动力学并解释时间箭头。然而，目前缺乏关于倒量子化振子的支持性实验证据。我们报告了对由光热非线性产生的倒谐振子的爆炸式n = 0和n = 2离散态以及Γ0和Γ2量子化衰减率的直接观测。我们的结果为不可逆量子力学的主要预测提供了实验验证，即存在具有量子化衰减率的态。我们的结果还为光学冲击波提供了一个新视角，可能对激光、光放大器、白光和X射线产生等应用有用。
