Synthetic parity-time symmetry breaking in a single microcavity

Abstract

Non-Hermitian systems based on parity-time (PT) symmetry reveal rich physics beyond the Hermitian regime. So far, realizations of PT-symmetric systems have been limited to the spatial domain. Here we theoretically and experimentally demonstrate PT symmetry in a synthetic spectral dimension induced by nonlinear Brillouin scattering in a single optical microcavity, where electromagnetically induced transparency or absorption in two spectral resonances provides the optical gain and loss to observe a phase transition between two symmetry regimes. This scheme provides a new paradigm towards the investigation of non-Hermitian physics in a synthetic photonic dimension for all-optical signal processing and quantum information science.