We demonstrate that a dipolar condensate can be prepared into a three-dimensional wave packet that remains localized when released in free space. Such self-bound states arise from the interplay of the two-body interactions and quantum fluctuations. We develop a phase diagram for the parameter regimes where these self-bound states are stable, examine their properties, and demonstrate how they can be produced in current experiments.

We report a quantum measurement beyond the standard quantum limit (SQL) for the amplitude of a small displacement acting on a cavity field. This measurement uses as a resource an entangled mesoscopic state, prepared by the resonant interaction of a circular Rydberg atom with a field stored in a superconducting cavity. We analyze the measurement process in terms of Fisher information and prove that it is, in principle, optimal. The experimental precision achieved, $2.4$ dB below the SQL, is well understood in terms of experimental imperfections. This method could be transposed to other systems, particularly to circuit QED, for the precise measurement of weak forces acting on oscillators.

We theoretically study the propagation of light through a cold atomic medium, where the effects of motion, laser intensity, atomic density, and polarization can all modify the properties of the scattered light. We present two different microscopic models: the “coherent dipole model” and the “random-walk model”, both suitable for modeling recent experimental work done in large atomic arrays in the low-light-intensity regime. We use them to compute relevant observables such as the linewidth, peak intensity, and line center of the emitted light. We further develop generalized models that explicitly take into account atomic motion. Those are relevant for hotter atoms and beyond the low-intensity regime. We show that atomic motion can lead to drastic dephasing and to a reduction of collective effects, together with a distortion of the line shape. Our results are applicable to model a full gamut of quantum systems that rely on atom-light interactions, including atomic clocks, quantum simulators, and nanophotonic systems.

We present a detailed study of photon pair generation in a multimode optical fiber via nonlinear four-wave mixing and intermodal phase matching. We show that in multimode optical fibers, it is possible to generate correlated photon pairs in different fiber modes with large spectral shifts from the pump wavelength, such that the photon pairs are immune to contamination from spontaneous Raman scattering and residual pump photons. We also show that it is possible to generate factorable two-photon states exhibiting minimal spectral correlations between the photon pair components in conventional multimode fibers using commonly available pump lasers. It is also possible to simultaneously generate multiple factorable states from different FWM processes in the same fiber and over a wide range of visible spectrum by varying the pump wavelength without affecting the factorability of the states. Therefore, photon pair generation in multimode optical fibers exhibits considerable potential for producing state engineered photons for quantum communications and quantum information processing applications.

We analyze the stability of extended edge modes in a nonlinear (i.e., interacting) bosonic topological insulator. We see that these nonlinear modes are always unstable, despite the topological protection of edge modes in the linear system. For concreteness we use a photonic platform, but the results generalize to other bosonic systems. We give a detailed description of the system in two extreme cases, low nonlinearity and high nonlinearity, and discuss the breakup of the nonlinear edge states into solitons.

A weighted difference of the $g$ factors of the Li- and H-like ion of the same element is studied and optimized in order to maximize the cancelation of nuclear effects. To this end, a detailed theoretical investigation is performed for the finite nuclear size correction to the one-electron $g$ factor, the one- and two-photon exchange effects, and the QED effects. The coefficients of the $Z\alpha$ expansion of these corrections are determined, which allows us to set up the optimal definition of the weighted difference. It is demonstrated that, for moderately light elements, such weighted difference is nearly free from uncertainties associated with nuclear effects and can be utilized to extract the fine-structure constant from bound-electron $g$-factor experiments with an accuracy competitive with or better than its current literature value.

The commonly used “practical” Bell inequalities for quantum optical fields, which use intensities as the observables, are derivable only if specific additional assumptions hold. This limits the range of local hidden variable theories, which are invalidated by their violation. We present alternative Bell inequalities, which do not suffer from any (theoretical) loophole. The inequalities are for correlations of averaged products of local rates. By rates we mean ratios of the measured intensity in the given local output channel to the total local measured intensity, in the given run of the experiment. Bell inequalities of this type detect entanglement in situations in which the “practical” ones fail. Thus, we have full consistency with Bell's theorem, and better device-independent entanglement indicators. Strongly driven type-II parametric down conversion (bright squeezed vacuum) is our working example. The approach can be used to modify many types of standard Bell inequalities, to the case of undefined particle numbers. The rule is to replace the usual probabilities by rates.

We develop a theory of artificial gauge fields in photon fluids for the cases of both second-order and third-order optical nonlinearities. This applies to weak excitations in the presence of pump fields carrying orbital angular momentum and is thus a type of Bogoliubov theory. The resulting artificial gauge fields experienced by the weak excitations are an interesting generalization of previous cases and reflect the PT-symmetry properties of the underlying non-Hermitian Hamiltonian. We illustrate the observable consequences of the resulting synthetic magnetic fields for examples involving both second-order and third-order nonlinearities.

A particularly simple setup is introduced to study the influence of time-delayed coherent feedback on the optical squeezing properties of the degenerate parametric amplifier. The possibility for significantly enhanced squeezing is demonstrated both on resonance and in sidebands, at a reduced pump power compared to the case without feedback. We study a broad range of operating parameters and their influence on the characteristic squeezing of the system. A classical analysis of the system dynamics reveals the connection between the feedback-modified landscape of stability and enhanced squeezing.

Discrete-time quantum walks allow Floquet topological insulator materials to be explored using controllable systems such as ultracold atoms in optical lattices. By numerical simulations, we study the robustness of topologically protected edge states in the presence of decoherence in one- and two-dimensional discrete-time quantum walks. We also develop a simple analytical model quantifying the robustness of these edge states against either spin or spatial dephasing, predicting an exponential decay of the population of topologically protected edge states. Moreover, we present an experimental proposal based on neutral atoms in spin-dependent optical lattices to realize spatial boundaries between distinct topological phases. Our proposal includes also a scheme to implement spin-dependent discrete shift operations in a two-dimensional optical lattice. We analyze under realistic decoherence conditions the experimental feasibility of observing unidirectional, dissipationless transport of matter waves along boundaries separating distinct topological domains.

We theoretically investigate trapped ions interacting with atoms that are coupled to Rydberg states. The strong polarizabilities of the Rydberg levels increase the interaction strength between atoms and ions by many orders of magnitude, as compared to the case of ground-state atoms, and may be mediated over micrometers. We calculate that such interactions can be used to generate entanglement between an atom and the motion or internal state of an ion. Furthermore, the ion could be used as a bus for mediating spin-spin interactions between atomic spins in analogy to much employed techniques in ion-trap quantum simulation. The proposed scheme comes with attractive features as it maps the benefits of the trapped-ion quantum system onto the atomic one without obviously impeding its intrinsic scalability. No ground-state cooling of the ion or atom is required and the setup allows for full dynamical control. Moreover, the scheme is to a large extent immune to the micromotion of the ion. Our findings are of interest for developing hybrid quantum information platforms and for implementing quantum simulations of solid-state physics.

Recent technological developments in the field of experimental quantum annealing have made prototypical annealing optimizers with hundreds of qubits commercially available. The experimental demonstration of a quantum speedup for optimization problems has since then become a coveted, albeit elusive goal. Recent studies have shown that the so far inconclusive results, regarding a quantum enhancement, may have been partly due to the benchmark problems used being unsuitable. In particular, these problems had inherently too simple a structure, allowing for both traditional resources and quantum annealers to solve them with no special efforts. The need therefore has arisen for the generation of harder benchmarks which would hopefully possess the discriminative power to separate classical scaling of performance with size from quantum. We introduce here a practical technique for the engineering of extremely hard spin-glass Ising-type problem instances that does not require “cherry picking” from large ensembles of randomly generated instances. We accomplish this by treating the generation of hard optimization problems itself as an optimization problem, for which we offer a heuristic algorithm that solves it. We demonstrate the genuine thermal hardness of our generated instances by examining them thermodynamically and analyzing their energy landscapes, as well as by testing the performance of various state-of-the-art algorithms on them. We argue that a proper characterization of the generated instances offers a practical, efficient way to properly benchmark experimental quantum annealers, as well as any other optimization algorithm.

We report an experimental realization of the quantum paradox of the separation of a single photon from one of its properties (the so-called “quantum Cheshire cat”). We use a modified Sagnac interferometer with displaced paths to produce appropriately pre- and postselected states of heralded single photons. Weak measurements of photon presence and circular polarization are performed in each arm of the interferometer by introducing weak absorbers and small polarization rotations and analyzing changes in the postselected signal. The absorber is found to have an appreciable effect only in one arm of the interferometer, while the polarization rotation significantly affects the signal only when performed in the other arm. We carry out both sequential and simultaneous weak measurements and find good agreement between measured and predicted weak values. In the language of Aharonov et al. and in the sense of the ensemble averages described by weak values, the experiment establishes the separation of a particle from one its properties during the passage through the interferometer.

Nano-structuring impurity-doped crystals affects the phonon density of states and thereby modifies the atomic dynamics induced by interaction with phonons. We propose the use of nano-structured materials in the form of powders or phononic bandgap crystals to enable or improve persistent spectral hole burning and coherence for inhomogeneously broadened absorption lines in rare-earth-ion-doped crystals. This is crucial for applications such as ultra-precise radio-frequency spectrum analyzers and optical quantum memories. As an example, we discuss how phonon engineering can enable spectral hole burning in erbium-doped materials operating in the convenient telecommunication band and present simulations for density of states of nano-sized powders and phononic crystals for the case of ${\mathrm{Y}}_2{\mathrm{SiO}}_5$, a widely used material in current quantum memory research.

We present measured momentum distributions on the double ionization of helium with intense, near-circularly-polarized few-cycle laser pulses with a known carrier-envelope offset phase (CEP). The capability of obtaining CEP-resolved momentum distributions enables us to observe signatures of the various combinations of laser-half-cycle two-electron emissions. By comparison to semiclassical trajectory simulations, we succeed in assigning the corresponding structures in the measured distributions to certain two-electron emission dynamics. Based on this possibility, we demonstrate that the sequential double-ionization dynamics can be sensitively controlled with the pulse duration and the laser peak intensity. For the shortest pulse durations and not too high intensities we find that the two electrons are dominantly emitted with a delay of roughly a laser half cycle. For a just slightly increased intensity we find evidence that at least one of the two electrons is surprisingly likely emitted in between the peaks of the laser field oscillations rather than at the field maxima. The simulations reproduce the signatures of these kinds of two-electron emissions overall relatively well.

We propose a scheme for probing the structure of vibrating molecules with photoelectrons generated from ultrashort soft-x-ray pulses. As an example we analyze below-100-eV photoelectrons liberated from the $S\left(2p\right)$ orbital of vibrating ${\mathrm{SF}}_6$ molecules to image very small structural changes of molecular vibration. In particular, photoionization cross sections and photoelectron angular distributions (PAD) at nonequilibrium geometries can be retrieved accurately with photoelectrons near the shape resonance at 13 eV. This is achieved with a pump-probe scheme, in which the symmetric stretch mode is first Raman excited predominantly by a relatively short laser pulse and then later probed at different time delays by a few-femtosecond soft-x-ray pulse with photon energy near 200 eV.

We propose two setups for realizing a chiral quantum network, where two-level systems representing the nodes interact via directional emission into discrete waveguides, as introduced in T. Ramos et al. [Phys. Rev. A 93, 062104 (2016)]. The first implementation realizes a spin waveguide via Rydberg states in a chain of atoms, whereas the second one realizes a phonon waveguide via the localized vibrations of a string of trapped ions. For both architectures, we show that strong chirality can be obtained by a proper design of synthetic gauge fields in the couplings from the nodes to the waveguide. In the Rydberg case, this is achieved via intrinsic spin-orbit coupling in the dipole-dipole interactions, while for the trapped ions it is obtained by engineered sideband transitions. We take long-range couplings into account that appear naturally in these implementations, discuss useful experimental parameters, and analyze potential error sources. Finally, we describe effects that can be observed in these implementations within state-of-the-art technology, such as the driven-dissipative formation of entangled dimer states.

Motion-induced dephasing is a dominant decoherence mechanism for atom-gas quantum memories. In this paper, we experimentally demonstrate a coherent manipulation technique which enables arbitrary engineering of the spin-wave momentum with neglectable noise. By zeroing the spin-wave momentum, motion-induced dephasing can be frozen completely. The experiment is carried out with laser-cooled atoms in a Duan-Lukin-Cirac-Zoller configuration. By applying the freezing pulses, memory lifetime gets extended significantly to the limit of atom cloud expansion and does not depend on the detection angle anymore. The observed high cross correlation above 20 proves that high-fidelity memory operation is well preserved after coherent manipulation.

We study the effect of cavity damping asymmetries on backaction in a “membrane-in-the-middle” optomechanical system, where a mechanical mode modulates the coupling between two photonic modes. We show that when the energy difference between the optical modes dominates (i.e., in the adiabatic limit) this system generically realizes a dissipative optomechanical coupling, with an effective position-dependent photonic damping rate. The resulting quantum noise interference can be used to ground-state cool a mechanical resonator in the unresolved sideband regime. We explicitly demonstrate how quantum noise interference controls linear backaction effects and show that this interference persists even outside the adiabatic limit. For a one-port cavity in the extreme bad cavity limit, the interference allows one to cancel all linear backaction effects. This allows continuous measurements of position-squared, with no stringent constraints on the single-photon optomechanical coupling strength. In contrast, such a complete cancellation is not possible in the good cavity limit. This places strict bounds on the optomechanical coupling required for quantum nondemolition measurements of mechanical energy, even in a one-port device.

Complex cryptographic protocols are often constructed from simpler building blocks. In order to advance quantum cryptography, it is important to study practical building blocks that can be used to develop new protocols. An example is quantum retrieval games (QRGs), which have broad applicability and have already been used to construct quantum money schemes. In this work, we introduce a general construction of quantum retrieval games based on the hidden matching problem and show how they can be implemented in practice using available technology. More precisely, we provide a general method to construct (1-out-of-$k$) QRGs, proving that their cheating probabilities decrease exponentially in $k$. In particular, we define QRGs based on coherent states of light, which can be implemented even in the presence of experimental imperfections. Our results constitute a tool in the arsenal of the practical quantum cryptographer.