skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.


This content will become publicly available on November 1, 2025

Title: Effective Piecewise Mass Distributions for Optimal Energy Eigenvalues of a Particle in Low-Dimensional Heterojunctions
Systems composed of several multi-layer compounds have been extremely useful in tailoring different quantum physical properties of nanomaterials. This is very much true when it comes to semiconductor materials and, in particular, to heterostructures and heterojunctions. The formalism of a position-dependent effective mass has proved to be a very efficient tool in those cases where quantum wells emerge either in one or two dimensions. In this work, we use a variety of mathematical theorems, as well as numerical computations, to study different scenarios pertaining to choices of a specific piecewise constant effective mass for a particle that causes its energy eigenvalues to reach an extremum. These results are relevant when it comes to practical technological applications such as modifying the optical energy gap between the first excited state and the ground state energy of the system. At the end of our contribution, we also question the physical validity of some approximations for systems with particles that possess a position-dependent mass especially for those cases in which the mass distribution is divergent.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2001980
PAR ID:
10560886
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ;
Publisher / Repository:
MDPI
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Nanomaterials
Volume:
14
Issue:
22
ISSN:
2079-4991
Page Range / eLocation ID:
1850
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. We report universal statistical properties displayed by ensembles of pure states that naturally emerge in quantum many-body systems. Specifically, two classes of state ensembles are considered: those formed by (i) the temporal trajectory of a quantum state under unitary evolution or (ii) the quantum states of small subsystems obtained by partial, local projective measurements performed on their complements. These cases, respectively, exemplify the phenomena of “Hilbert-space ergodicity” and “deep thermalization.” In both cases, the resultant ensembles are defined by a simple principle: The distributions of pure states have maximum entropy, subject to constraints such as energy conservation, and effective constraints imposed by thermalization. We present and numerically verify quantifiable signatures of this principle by deriving explicit formulas for all statistical moments of the ensembles, proving the necessary and sufficient conditions for such universality under widely accepted assumptions, and describing their measurable consequences in experiments. We further discuss information-theoretic implications of the universality: Our ensembles have maximal information content while being maximally difficult to interrogate, establishing that generic quantum state ensembles that occur in nature hide (scramble) information as strongly as possible. Our results generalize the notions of Hilbert-space ergodicity to time-independent Hamiltonian dynamics and deep thermalization from infinite to finite effective temperature. Our work presents new perspectives to characterize and understand universal behaviors of quantum dynamics using statistical and information-theoretic tools. Published by the American Physical Society2024 
    more » « less
  2. The vacuum polarization energy is the leading quantum correction to the classical energy of a soliton. We study this energy for two-component solitons in one space dimension as a function of the soliton’s topological charge. We find that both the classical and the vacuum polarization energies are linear functions of the topological charge with a small offset. Because the combination of the classical and quantum offsets determines the binding energies, either all higher charge solitons are energetically bound or they are all unbound, depending on model parameters. This linearity persists even when the field configurations are very different from those of isolated solitons and would not be apparent from an analysis of their bound state spectra alone. Published by the American Physical Society2025 
    more » « less
  3. An impurity interacting with an ultracold Fermi gas can form either a polaron state or a dressed molecular state, the molaron, in which the impurity forms a bound state with one gas particle. This molaron state features rich physics, including a negative effective mass around unitarity and a first-order transition to the polaron state. However, these features have remained so far experimentally inaccessible. In this work we show theoretically how the molaron state can be directly prepared experimentally even in its excited states using Raman spectroscopy techniques. Initializing the system in the ultrastrong coupling limit, where the binding energy of the molaron is much larger than the Fermi energy, our protocol maps out the momentum-dependent spectral function of the molecule. Using a diagrammatic approach we furthermore show that the molecular spectral function serves as a direct precursor of the elusive Fulde-Ferell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov phase, which is realized for a finite density of fermionic impurity particles. Our results pave the way to a systematic understanding of how composite particles form in quantum many-body environments and provide a basis to develop new schemes for the observation of exotic phases of quantum many-body systems. Published by the American Physical Society2024 
    more » « less
  4. The loss of any symmetry in a system leads to quantum problems that are typically very difficult to solve. Such a situation arises for particles with anisotropic mass, like electrons in various semiconductor host materials, where it is known that they may have an anisotropic effective mass. In this work, we consider the quantum problem of a spinless charged particle with anisotropic mass in two dimensions and study the resulting energy and eigenstate spectrum in a uniform constant perpendicular magnetic field when a Landau gauge is adopted. The exact analytic solution to the problem is obtained for arbitrary values of the anisotropic mass using a mathematical technique that relies on the scaling of the original coordinates. The characteristic features of the energy spectrum and corresponding eigenstate wave functions are analyzed. The results of this study are expected to be of interest to quantum Hall effect theory. 
    more » « less
  5. Quantum circuit simulations enable researchers to develop quantum algorithms without the need for a physical quantum computer. Quantum computing simulators, however, all suffer from significant memory footprint requirements, which prevents large circuits from being simulated on classical super-computers. In this paper, we explore different lossy compression strategies to substantially shrink quantum circuit tensors in the QTensor package (a state-of-the-art tensor network quantum circuit simulator) while ensuring the reconstructed data satisfy the user-needed fidelity.Our contribution is fourfold. (1) We propose a series of optimized pre- and post-processing steps to boost the compression ratio of tensors with a very limited performance overhead. (2) We characterize the impact of lossy decompressed data on quantum circuit simulation results, and leverage the analysis to ensure the fidelity of reconstructed data. (3) We propose a configurable compression framework for GPU based on cuSZ and cuSZx, two state-of-the-art GPU-accelerated lossy compressors, to address different use-cases: either prioritizing compression ratios or prioritizing compression speed. (4) We perform a comprehensive evaluation by running 9 state-of-the-art compressors on an NVIDIA A100 GPU based on QTensor-generated tensors of varying sizes. When prioritizing compression ratio, our results show that our strategies can increase the compression ratio nearly 10 times compared to using only cuSZ. When prioritizing throughput, we can perform compression at the comparable speed as cuSZx while achieving 3-4× higher compression ratios. Decompressed tensors can be used in QTensor circuit simulation to yield a final energy result within 1-5% of the true energy value. 
    more » « less