In conventional wisdom, producing a curved space requires distortions, such as bending or stretching a flat space. A team of researchers at Purdue University have discovered a new method to create curved spaces that also solves a mystery in physics. Without any physical distortions of physical systems, the team has designed a scheme using non-Hermiticity, which exists in any systems coupled to environments, to create a hyperbolic surface and a variety of other prototypical curved spaces.
"Our work may revolutionize the general public's understanding of curvatures and distance," says Qi Zhou, Professor of Physics and Astronomy. "It has also answered long-standing questions in non-Hermitian quantum mechanics by bridging non-Hermitian physics and curved spaces. These two subjects were assumed to be completely disconnected. The extraordinary behaviors of non-Hermitian systems, which have puzzled physicists for decades, become no longer mysterious if we recognize that the space has been curved. In other words, non-Hermiticity and curved spaces are dual to each other, being the two sides of the same coin."
The team recently published their findings in Nature Communications. Of the members of the team, most work at Purdue University's West Lafayette campus. Chenwei Lv, graduate student, is the lead author, and other members of the Purdue team include Prof. Qi Zhou, and Zhengzheng Zhai, postdoctoral fellow. The co-first author, Prof. Ren Zhang from Xi'an Jiaotong University, was a visiting scholar at Purdue when the project was initiated.
To read more, click here.