Yields of atomic iodine ${\mathrm{I}}^{q+}$ ($q\ge 2$) fragments resulting from photoexcitation and photoionization of the target ions ${\mathrm{IH}}^{+}$ and ${\mathrm{I}}^{+}$ have been measured in the photon-energy range 610–680 eV, which comprises the thresholds for iodine $3d$ ionization. The measured ion-yield spectra show two strong and broad resonance features due to the excitation of the $3d_{3/2,5/2}$ electrons into $\varepsilon f$ states rather similar for both parent ions. In the $3d$ pre-edge range, excitations into $\left(np\pi \right)$-like orbitals and into an additional ${\sigma }^{*}$ orbital are found for ${\mathrm{IH}}^{+}$, which have been identified by comparison of the atomic ${\mathrm{I}}^{+}$ and molecular ${\mathrm{IH}}^{+}$ data and with the help of (time-dependent) density functional theory (DFT) and atomic Hartree-Fock calculations. The $\left(5p\pi \right)$ orbital is almost atomlike, whereas all other resonances of the ${\mathrm{IH}}^{+}$ primary ion show a more pronounced molecular character, which is deduced from the chemical shifts of the resonances and the theoretical analysis.

We numerically simulate the free decay of two-dimensional quantum turbulence in a large, homogeneous Bose-Einstein condensate. The large number of vortices, the uniformity of the density profile, and the absence of boundaries (where vortices can drift out of the condensate) isolate the annihilation of vortex-antivortex pairs as the only mechanism which reduces the number of vortices, $N_{\mathrm{v}}$, during the turbulence decay. The results clearly reveal that vortex annihilation is a four-vortex process, confirming the decay law $N_{\mathrm{v}}\sim t^{-1/3}$ where $t$ is time, which was inferred from experiments with relatively few vortices in small harmonically trapped condensates.

Quantum state preparation is vital to quantum computation and quantum information processing tasks. In adiabatic state preparation, the target state is theoretically obtained with nearly perfect fidelity if the control parameter is tuned slowly enough. As this, however, leads to slow dynamics, it is often desirable to be able to carry out processes more rapidly. In this work, we employ two global optimization methods to estimate the quantum speed limit for few-fermion systems confined in a one-dimensional harmonic trap. Such systems can be produced experimentally in a well-controlled manner. We determine the optimized control fields and achieve a reduction in the ramping time of more than a factor of four compared to linear ramping. We also investigate how robust the fidelity is to small variations of the control fields away from the optimized shapes.

We demonstrate that using spatially divergent incident femtosecond 1240-nm laser pulses in water leads to an efficient supercontinuum generation in filaments. Optimal conditions were found when the focal plane is placed $100–400\mu \mathrm{m}$ before the water surface. Under sufficiently weak focusing conditions [numerical aperture ($\mathrm{NA})<0.2$] and low-energy laser pulses, the supercontinuum energy generated in divergent beams is higher than the supercontinuum energy generated in convergent beams. Analysis by means of the unidirectional pulse propagation equation shows a dramatic difference between filamentation scenarios of divergent and convergent beams, that explains corresponding features of the supercontinuum generation. Under strong focusing conditions ($\mathrm{NA}⩾0.2$) and high-energy laser pulses, the supercontinuum generation is suppressed for convergent beams in contrast to divergent beams that nevertheless are shown experimentally to allow supercontinuum generation. The presented technique of the supercontinuum generation in divergent beams in water is highly demanded in a development of femtosecond optical parametric amplifiers.

As recently realized experimentally [Nature (London) 543, 87 (2017)], one can engineer models with continuous symmetries by coupling two cavity modes to trapped atoms via a Raman pumping geometry. Considering specifically cases where internal states of the atoms couple to the cavity, we show an extended range of parameters for which continuous symmetry breaking can occur, and we classify the distinct steady states and time-dependent states that arise for different points in this extended parameter regime.

Phases of quantum transition amplitudes contain very important information about physical processes. However, as a rule, they may not be accessed experimentally. This is, in particular, the case when collisions of ions and atoms are studied. In this rapid communication, we explore double-electron capture in collisions of $\alpha$ particles with CO molecules. Regarding the atomic cores of the molecule as two “slits,” we show that atomic “double-slit” interference can be exploited to experimentally extract information about phases of the projectile scattering on the cores.

We describe a quantum trajectories technique for the unraveling of the quantum adiabatic master equation in Lindblad form. By evolving a complex state vector of dimension $N$ instead of a complex density matrix of dimension $N^2$, simulations of larger system sizes become feasible. The cost of running many trajectories, which is required to recover the master equation evolution, can be minimized by running the trajectories in parallel, making this method suitable for high performance computing clusters. In general, the trajectories method can provide up to a factor $N$ advantage over directly solving the master equation. In special cases where only the expectation values of certain observables are desired, an advantage of up to a factor $N^2$ is possible. We test the method by demonstrating agreement with direct solution of the quantum adiabatic master equation for 8-qubit quantum annealing examples. We also apply the quantum trajectories method to a 16-qubit example originally introduced to demonstrate the role of tunneling in quantum annealing, which is significantly more time consuming to solve directly using the master equation. The quantum trajectories method provides insight into individual quantum jump trajectories and their statistics, thus shedding light on open system quantum adiabatic evolution beyond the master equation.

Grid (or comb) states are an interesting class of bosonic states introduced by Gottesman, Kitaev, and Preskill [D. Gottesman, A. Kitaev, and J. Preskill, Phys. Rev. A 64, 012310 (2001)] to encode a qubit into an oscillator. A method to generate or “breed” a grid state from Schrödinger cat states using beam splitters and homodyne measurements is known [H. M. Vasconcelos, L. Sanz, and S. Glancy, Opt. Lett. 35, 3261 (2010)], but this method requires postselection. In this paper we show how postprocessing of the measurement data can be used to entirely remove the need for postselection, making the scheme much more viable. We bound the asymptotic behavior of the breeding procedure and demonstrate the efficacy of the method numerically.

Quantum coherence plays a central role in various research areas. The $l_1$-norm of coherence is one of the most important coherence measures that are easily computable, but it is not easy to find a simple interpretation. We show that the $l_1$-norm of coherence is uniquely characterized by a few simple axioms, which demonstrates in a precise sense that it is the analog of negativity in entanglement theory and sum negativity in the resource theory of magic-state quantum computation. We also provide an operational interpretation of the $l_1$-norm of coherence as the maximum entanglement, measured by the negativity, produced by incoherent operations acting on the system and an incoherent ancilla. To achieve this goal, we clarify the relation between the $l_1$-norm of coherence and negativity for all bipartite states, which leads to an interesting generalization of maximally correlated states. Surprisingly, all entangled states thus obtained are distillable. Moreover, their entanglement cost and distillable entanglement can be computed explicitly for a qubit-qudit system.

We study theoretically and experimentally the competing blockade and antiblockade effects induced by spontaneously generated contaminant Rydberg atoms in driven Rydberg systems. These contaminant atoms provide a source of strong dipole-dipole interactions and play a crucial role in the system's behavior. We study this problem theoretically using two different approaches. The first is a cumulant expansion approximation, in which we ignore third-order and higher connected correlations. Using this approach for the case of resonant drive, a many-body blockade radius picture arises, and we find qualitative agreement with previous experimental results. We further predict that as the atomic density is increased, the Rydberg population's dependence on Rabi frequency will transition from quadratic to linear dependence at lower Rabi frequencies. We study this behavior experimentally by observing this crossover at two different atomic densities. We confirm that the larger density system has a smaller crossover Rabi frequency than the smaller density system. The second theoretical approach is a set of phenomenological inhomogeneous rate equations. We compare the results of our rate-equation model to the experimental observations [E. A. Goldschmidt et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 116, 113001 (2016)] and find that these rate equations provide quantitatively good scaling behavior of the steady-state Rydberg population for both resonant and off-resonant drives.

We propose a driving scheme, wherein different parts of a system are driven with different, generally incommensurate, frequencies. Such driving provides a flexible handle to control various properties of the system and to obtain new types of effective (static) Hamiltonians with arbitrary static on-site potential, be it deterministic or random. This allows us to obtain reconfigurable changes in transport, from ballistic to localized (including sub- and superdiffusion), depending on the driving protocol. The versatile reconfigurability extends also to scattering from (locally) driven extended targets. We demonstrate our scheme using an analytically solvable example of a one-dimensional tight-binding chain with appropriately driven couplings between nearby sites.

Making use of coherence and entanglement as metrological quantum resources allows us to improve the measurement precision from the shot-noise or quantum limit to the Heisenberg limit. Quantum metrology then relies on the availability of quantum engineered systems that involve controllable quantum degrees of freedom which are sensitive to the measured quantity. Sensors operating in the qubit mode and exploiting their coherence in a phase-sensitive measurement have been shown to approach the Heisenberg scaling in precision. Here, we show that this result can be further improved by operating the quantum sensor in the qudit mode, i.e., by exploiting $d$ rather than two levels. Specifically, we describe the metrological algorithm for using a superconducting transmon device operating in a qutrit mode as a magnetometer. The algorithm is based on the base-3 semiquantum Fourier transformation and enhances the quantum theoretical performance of the sensor by a factor of 2. Even more, the practical gain of our qutrit implementation is found in a reduction of the number of iteration steps of the quantum Fourier transformation by the factor $ln\left(2\right)/ln\left(3\right)\approx 0.63$ compared to the qubit mode. We show that a two-tone capacitively coupled radio-frequency signal is sufficient for implementation of the algorithm.

We investigate quantum backtracking algorithms of the type introduced by Montanaro (Montanaro, arXiv:1509.02374). These algorithms explore trees of unknown structure and in certain settings exponentially outperform their classical counterparts. Some of the previous work focused on obtaining a quantum advantage for trees in which a unique marked vertex is promised to exist. We remove this restriction by recharacterizing the problem in terms of the effective resistance of the search space. In this paper, we present a generalization of one of Montanaro's algorithms to trees containing $k$ marked vertices, where $k$ is not necessarily known a priori. Our approach involves using amplitude estimation to determine a near-optimal weighting of a diffusion operator, which can then be applied to prepare a superposition state with support only on marked vertices and ancestors thereof. By repeatedly sampling this state and updating the input vertex, a marked vertex is reached in a logarithmic number of steps. The algorithm thereby achieves the conjectured bound of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}\left(\sqrt{T{R}_{\max }}\right)$ for finding a single marked vertex and $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}\left(k\sqrt{T{R}_{\max }}\right)$ for finding all $k$ marked vertices, where $T$ is an upper bound on the tree size and $R_{\max }$ is the maximum effective resistance encountered by the algorithm. This constitutes a speedup over Montanaro's original procedure in both the case of finding one and the case of finding multiple marked vertices in an arbitrary tree.

We propose a measure of quantum steerability, namely, a convex steering monotone, based on the trace distance between a given assemblage and its corresponding closest assemblage admitting a local-hidden-state (LHS) model. We provide methods to estimate such a quantity, via lower and upper bounds, based on semidefinite programming. One of these upper bounds has a clear geometrical interpretation as a linear function of rescaled Euclidean distances in the Bloch sphere between the normalized quantum states of (i) a given assemblage and (ii) an LHS assemblage. For a qubit-qubit quantum state, these ideas also allow us to visualize various steerability properties of the state in the Bloch sphere via the so-called LHS surface. In particular, some steerability properties can be obtained by comparing such an LHS surface with a corresponding quantum steering ellipsoid. Thus, we propose a witness of steerability corresponding to the difference of the volumes enclosed by these two surfaces. This witness (which reveals the steerability of a quantum state) enables one to find an optimal measurement basis, which can then be used to determine the proposed steering monotone (which describes the steerability of an assemblage) optimized over all mutually unbiased bases.

Operator-sum representations of quantum channels can be obtained by applying the channel to one subsystem of a maximally entangled state and deploying the channel-state isomorphism. However, for continuous-variable systems, such schemes contain natural divergences since the maximally entangled state is ill defined. We introduce a method that avoids such divergences by utilizing finitely entangled (squeezed) states and then taking the limit of arbitrary large squeezing. Using this method, we derive an operator-sum representation for all single-mode bosonic Gaussian channels where a unique feature is that both quantum-limited and noisy channels are treated on an equal footing. This technique facilitates a proof that the rank-1 Kraus decomposition for Gaussian channels at its respective entanglement-breaking thresholds, obtained in the overcomplete coherent-state basis, is unique. The methods could have applications to simulation of continuous-variable channels.

We investigate an optimization problem of finding quantum sequential measurements, which forms a wide class of state discrimination problems with the restriction that only local operations and one-way classical communication are allowed. Sequential measurements from Alice to Bob on a bipartite system are considered. Using the fact that the optimization problem can be formulated as a problem with only Alice's measurement and is convex programming, we derive its dual problem and necessary and sufficient conditions for an optimal solution. Our results are applicable to various practical optimization criteria, including the Bayes criterion, the Neyman-Pearson criterion, and the minimax criterion. In the setting of the problem of finding an optimal global measurement, its dual problem and necessary and sufficient conditions for an optimal solution have been widely used to obtain analytical and numerical expressions for optimal solutions. Similarly, our results are useful to obtain analytical and numerical expressions for optimal sequential measurements. Examples in which our results can be used to obtain an analytical expression for an optimal sequential measurement are provided.

This study suggests that the unavoidable spatial inhomogeneity of intense electromagnetic fields has a drastic effect on the electron-positron pair-creation process from the vacuum. We use the example of the Breit-Wheeler process, where the collision of two gamma-ray photons is predicted to create electron-positron pairs, to show that the multiphoton pair-creation process cannot be modeled by solutions to the Dirac equation under time-periodic fields that are spatially homogeneous. The neglect of the spatial inhomogeneity leads here to spurious energy spectra and misleading pair-creation yields that can be incorrect by several orders of magnitude. This finding is surprising as there are many widely cited works where the laser is modeled by a spatially homogeneous alternating electric field.

We present a numerical implementation of the infinite-range exterior complex scaling [Scrinzi, Phys. Rev. A 81, 053845 (2010)] as an efficient absorbing boundary to the time-dependent complete-active-space self-consistent field method [Sato, Ishikawa, Březinová, Lackner, Nagele, and Burgdörfer, Phys. Rev. A 94, 023405 (2016)] for multielectron atoms subject to an intense laser pulse. We introduce Gauss-Laguerre-Radau quadrature points to construct discrete variable representation basis functions in the last radial finite element extending to infinity. This implementation is applied to strong-field ionization and high-harmonic generation in He, Be, and Ne atoms. It efficiently prevents unphysical reflection of photoelectron wave packets at the simulation boundary, enabling accurate simulations with substantially reduced computational cost, even under significant ($\approx 50\%$) double ionization. For the case of a simulation of high-harmonic generation from Ne, for example, 80% cost reduction is achieved, compared to a mask-function absorption boundary.