Time-reversed Landau-Zener tunneling in synthetic temporal lattices
Phys. Rev. A 112, 013523 – Published 21 July, 2025
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/jv83-xgvs
Abstract
As the flow of time governs all evolutions, the reversal of time evolution has garnered intense research in many fields. The phenomenon of Landau-Zener (LZ) tunneling is one of the most remarkable time evolution processes in quantum mechanics. In this work, we study LZ tunneling with time-reversal operation in a Floquet system of synthetic temporal lattices, which is formed by the evolution of optical pulses in coupled fiber loops. With an abrupt change of gauge potential and the splitting parameter imposed on the lattices, the two eigenstates of the system are exchanged so that the time-reversal operation is realized. In the experiment, we demonstrate that time-reversal operations eliminate path degeneracy through propagation path reconstruction. The measurement of the dynamics of LZ tunneling and that with time-reversal operation is shown by applying the quenching dynamics. The study provides an effective approach to perform the LZ tunneling with time-reversal operation and expands our capability of measuring various tunneling processes. These methods can also be applied to optical interferometers, fiber communications, and quantum control.
