We consider multitime correlators for output signals from linear detectors, continuously measuring several qubit observables at the same time. Using the quantum Bayesian formalism, we show that for unital (symmetric) evolution in the absence of phase backaction, an $N$-time correlator can be expressed as a product of two-time correlators when $N$ is even. For odd $N$, there is a similar factorization, which also includes a single-time average. Theoretical predictions agree well with experimental results for two detectors, which simultaneously measure noncommuting qubit observables.

We propose a method to interpolate dynamics of von Neumann and classical master equations with an arbitrary mixing parameter to investigate the thermal effects in quantum dynamics. The two dynamics are mixed by intervening to continuously modify their solutions, thus coupling them indirectly instead of directly introducing a coupling term. This maintains the quantum system in a pure state even after the introduction of thermal effects and obtains not only a density matrix but also a state vector representation. Further, we demonstrate that the dynamics of a two-level system can be rewritten as a set of standard differential equations, resulting in quantum dynamics that includes thermal relaxation. These equations are equivalent to the optical Bloch equations at the weak coupling and asymptotic limits, implying that the dynamics cause thermal effects naturally. Numerical simulations of ferromagnetic and frustrated systems support this idea. Finally, we use this method to study thermal effects in quantum annealing, revealing nontrivial performance improvements for a spin glass model over a certain range of annealing time. This result may enable us to optimize the annealing time of real annealing machines.

The one- and two-electron Yukawa atoms, also referred to as the Debye-Hückel or screened Coulomb atoms, have been topics of considerable interest both for intrinsic reasons and because of their relevance to terrestrial and astrophysical plasmas. At sufficiently high screening the one-electron Yukawa atom ceases to be bound. Some calculations appeared to suggest that as the screening increases in the ground state of the two-electron Yukawa atom (in which both the one-particle attraction and the interparticle repulsion are screened) the two electrons are detached simultaneously, at the same screening constant at which the one-electron atom becomes unbound. Our results rule this scenario out, offering an alternative that is not less interesting. In particular, it is found that for $Z<1$ a mild amount of screening actually increases the binding energy of the second electron. At the nuclear charge $Z_c\approx 0.911028...$, at which the bare Coulomb two-electron atom becomes unbound, and even over a range of lower nuclear charges, an appropriate amount of screening gives rise to a bound two-electron system.

We provide a description of the dynamic structure factor of a homogeneous unitary Fermi gas at low momentum and low frequency, based on the dissipative two-fluid hydrodynamic theory. The viscous relaxation time is estimated and is used to determine the regime where the hydrodynamic theory is applicable and to understand the nature of sound waves in the density response near the superfluid phase transition. By collecting the best knowledge on the shear viscosity and thermal conductivity known so far, we calculate the various diffusion coefficients and obtain the damping width of the (first and second) sounds. We find that the damping width of the first sound is greatly enhanced across the superfluid transition and very close to the transition the second sound might be resolved in the density response for the transferred momentum up to half of Fermi momentum. Our work is motivated by the recent measurement of the local dynamic structure factor at low momentum at Swinburne University of Technology and the ongoing experiment on sound attenuation of a homogeneous unitary Fermi gas at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. We discuss how the measurement of the velocity and damping width of the sound modes in low-momentum dynamic structure factor may lead to an improved determination of the universal superfluid density, shear viscosity, and thermal conductivity of a unitary Fermi gas.

We study theoretically the usefulness of spin-1 Bose condensates with macroscopic magnetization in a homogeneous magnetic field for quantum metrology. We demonstrate Heisenberg scaling of the quantum Fisher information for states in thermal equilibrium. The scaling applies to both antiferromagnetic and ferromagnetic interactions. The effect preserves as long as fluctuations of magnetization are sufficiently small. Scaling of the quantum Fisher information with the total particle number is derived within the mean-field approach in the zero-temperature limit and exactly in the high-magnetic-field limit for any temperature. The precision gain is intuitively explained owing to subtle features of the quasidistribution function in the phase space.

We present an experimental and theoretical study of the stimulated Raman emission in hollow-core kagome waveguides in a pump-probe arrangement. We perform an experimental investigation of the power of the Stokes signal from the probe, which is below the stimulated Raman scattering threshold, as a function the pump-probe delay time. The results show the Stokes power to increase with pump-probe delay, reaching a maximum at 10 ns, and to decrease afterward. In view of a coherence decay time of only 0.25 ns, we demonstrate a surprisingly slow reduction of Stokes signal with the characteristic time much longer than the coherence decay time by a factor of up to 40. The numerical investigations explain the observed phenomenon as a result of the spatiotemporal dynamics of the probe pulse and Raman coherence. We show that the increase of the characteristic time can be related to the spatial position of the intense sideband generation event and its dependence on the pump-probe delay.

In a recent paper [Phys. Rev. A 94, 032115 (2016)], Griffiths questioned—based on an interesting consistent-histories (CH) argument—the counterfactuality, for one of the bit choices, of the protocol of Salih et al. for communicating without sending physical particles [Phys. Rev. Lett. 110, 170502 (2013)]. Here, we first show that for the Mach-Zehnder version used to explain our protocol, contrary to Griffiths's claim, no family of consistent histories exists where any history has the photon traveling through the communication channel, thus rendering the question of whether the photon was in the communication channel meaningless from a CH viewpoint. We then show that for the actual Michelson-type protocol, there is a consistent-histories family for each cycle that includes histories where the photon travels through the communication channel. We show that the probability of finding the photon in the communication channel at any time is zero—proving complete counterfactuality.

While much of the technical analysis in the preceding Comment is correct, in the end it confirms the conclusion reached in my previous work [Phys. Rev. A 94, 032115 (2016)]: A consistent histories analysis provides no support for the claim of counterfactual quantum communication put forward by Salih et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 110, 170502 (2013)].

Physical modeling translates measured data into a physical model. Physical modeling is a major objective in physics and is generally regarded as a creative process. How good are computers at solving this task? Here, we show that in the absence of physical heuristics, the inference of optimal quantum models cannot be computed efficiently (unless $\text{P}=\text{NP}$). This result illuminates rigorous limits to the extent to which computers can be used to further our understanding of nature.

We present a wavelength study of the strong-field single-electron ionization of molecular iodine near its one-photon $B$-state resonance at 530 nm. We have previously identified two ionization channels [Phys. Rev. A 95, 013410 (2017)]: ionization of the high-lying molecular orbitals and ionization of the deep orbitals in ${\text{I}}_2$. We find a resonant enhancement of both channels, although the peak enhancement occurs at different wavelengths for the different channels. Moreover, the branching ratio of the ionization of the deep orbitals shows a dispersion-like function, with the branching ratio of the deep orbitals reaching over 98% at 519 nm. Finally, the branching ratio of double ionization into an excited state of ${\text{I}}_2^{2+}$ as a function of wavelength closely matches the branching ratio of the single ionization of deep orbitals, implying that excitation of molecular ions generally comes about through inner orbital ionization. These findings are inconsistent with current molecular ionization theory.

We develop theoretically and confirm both numerically and experimentally a comprehensive analytical model which describes the propensity rules in the emission of circularly polarized high harmonics by systems driven by two-color counter-rotating fields, a fundamental and its second harmonic. We identify and confirm the three propensity rules responsible for the contrast between the $3N+1$ and $3N+2$ harmonic lines in the HHG spectra of noble gas atoms. We demonstrate how these rules depend on the laser parameters and how they can be used in the experiment to shape the polarization properties of the emitted attosecond pulses.

We demonstrate that the confinement of half-quantized vortices (HQVs) in coherently coupled Bose-Einstein condensates simulates certain aspects of the confinement in a theory like $\text{SU}\left(2\right)$ quantum chromodynamics (QCD) in 2+1 space-time dimensions. By identifying the circulation of superfluid velocity as the baryon number and the relative phase between two components as a dual gluon, we identify HQVs in a single component as electrically charged particles with a half baryon number. Further, we show that only singlet states of the relative phase of two components can stably exist as bound states of vortices, that is, a pair of vortices in each component (a baryon) and a pair of a vortex and an antivortex in the same component (a meson). We then study the dynamics of a baryon and meson; a baryon is static at equilibrium and rotates once it deviates from the equilibrium, while a meson moves with constant velocity. For both baryons and mesons we verify a linear confinement and determine that they are broken, thus creating other baryons or mesons in the middle when two constituent vortices are separated by more than some critical distance, resembling QCD.

Both mixtures of atomic Bose-Einstein condensates and systems with atoms trapped in optical lattices have been intensely explored theoretically, mainly due to the exceptional developments on the experimental side. We investigate the properties of ultracold atomic impurities (bosons) immersed in a vortex lattice of a second Bose-condensed species. In contrast to the static optical-lattice configuration, the vortex lattice presents intrinsic dynamics given by its Tkachenko modes. These excitations induce additional correlations between the impurities, which consist of a long-range attractive potential and a density-dependent hopping, described here in the framework of an extended Bose-Hubbard model. We compute the quantum phase diagram of the impurity species through a Gutzwiller ansatz and through the mean-field approach, and separately identify the effects of the two additional terms, i.e., the shift and the deformation of the Mott-insulator lobes. The long-range attraction, in particular, induces the existence of a triple point in the phase diagram, in agreement with previous quantum Monte Carlo calculations [Chaviguri et al., Phys. Rev. A 95, 053639 (2017)].

Sum and product uncertainty relations, containing variances of three or four observables, but not containing explicitly their covariances, are derived. Their consequences are, in particular, inequalities, giving nonzero lower bounds for the products of two variances in the case of zero mean value of the commutator between the related operators. Explicit examples show that the bounds can be better than the known Robertson-Schrödinger one.

We present the NMR implementation of a scheme for selective and efficient quantum process tomography without ancilla. We generalize this scheme such that it can be implemented efficiently using only a set of measurements involving product operators. The method allows us to estimate any element of the quantum process matrix to a desired precision, provided a set of quantum states can be prepared efficiently. Our modified technique requires fewer experimental resources as compared to the standard implementation of selective and efficient quantum process tomography, as it exploits the special nature of NMR measurements to allow us to compute specific elements of the process matrix by a restrictive set of subsystem measurements. To demonstrate the efficacy of our scheme, we experimentally tomograph the processes corresponding to “no operation,” a controlled-NOT (CNOT), and a controlled-Hadamard gate on a two-qubit NMR quantum information processor, with high fidelities.

An electric charge near the surface of a topological insulator (TI) induces an image magnetic monopole. Here we study the spectra of hydrogenlike ions near the surface of a planar TI, taking into account the modifications which arise due to the presence of the image monopole magnetic fields. In fact, the atom-TI interaction provides additional contributions to the Casimir-Polder potential while the ion-TI interaction modifies the energy shifts in the spectrum, which now became distance dependent. We show that the hyperfine structure is sensitive to the image magnetic monopole fields in states with nonzero angular momentum and that circular Rydberg ions can enhance the maximal energy shifts. We discuss in detail the energy splitting of the $n{P}_{1/2}$ and $n{P}_{3/2}$ states in hydrogen. We also analyze the Casimir-Polder potential and find that this magnetic interaction produces a large-distance repulsive tail for some particular atomic states. A sizable value of the maximum of the potential requires TIs with very low values of the permittivity together with high values of the topological magnetoelectric polarization.

We present a simple two-dimensional model of the indirect dissociative recombination process. The model has one electronic and one nuclear degree of freedom and it can be solved to high precision, without making any physically motivated approximations, by employing the exterior complex scaling method together with the finite-elements method and discrete variable representation. The approach is applied to solve a model for dissociative recombination of ${{\mathrm{H}}_2}^{+}$ in the singlet ungerade channels, and the results serve as a benchmark to test validity of several physical approximations commonly used in the computational modeling of dissociative recombination for real molecular targets. The second, approximate, set of calculations employs a combination of multichannel quantum defect theory and frame transformation into a basis of Siegert pseudostates. The cross sections computed with the two methods are compared in detail for collision energies from 0 to 2 eV.

We present symmetry effects of laser fields and molecular geometries in circularly polarized high-order harmonic generation by bichromatic counter-rotating circularly polarized laser pulses. Simulations are performed on oriented molecules by numerically solving time-dependent Schrödinger equations. We discuss how electron recollision trajectories by the orthogonal laser field polarizations influence the harmonic polarization by using a time-frequency analysis of harmonics. It is found that orientation-dependent asymmetric ionization in linear molecules due to Coulomb potentials gives rise to a dependence of the polarization on the harmonic frequency. Effects of Coriolis forces are also presented on harmonic generation. Electron recollision trajectories illustrate the effects of the relative symmetry of the field and the molecule, thus paving a method for circularly polarized attosecond pulse generation and molecular orbital imaging in more complex systems.