Hermiticity-tunable beam reshaping: localization, recurrence and group velocity oscillation

Abstract

We propose a novel method to reshape the light beam in a Hermiticity-tunable photonic lattice with PT symmetric perturbations. By adjusting the PT perturbations, the Hermiticity of the system varies alternatively, further resulting in the periodic oscillations of the group velocity ( v _g ) as well as the group velocity dispersion (GVD). Once the values of v _g and its corresponding GVD recover and the averaged group velocity ( ${\bar{v}}_{{\rm{g}}}$ ) is zero, the light beam will be localized and recur at these Hermitian points. Further study indicates that GVD plays a key role in the evolution of the light beam, larger positive dispersion [Re(GVD)] and lower magnitude of Im(GVD) lead to higher peak energy of the light field. Our work provides a non-resonant way to control the light propagation and to reshape the group velocity distribution, which may have promising applications in all-optical circuit, optical sensor and optical communications.

Keywords

• group velocity
• non-Hermitian photonics
• dynamic localization