Graphene as a zero-band-gap two-dimensional semiconductor with a linear electron band dispersion near the Dirac points has the potential to exhibit very interesting nonlinear optical properties. In particular, third-harmonic generation of terahertz radiation should occur due to the nonlinear relationship between the crystal momentum and the current density. In this work, we investigate the terahertz nonlinear response of graphene inside a parallel-plate waveguide. We optimize the plate separation and Fermi energy of the graphene to maximize third-harmonic generation, by maximizing the nonlinear interaction while minimizing the loss and phase mismatch. The results obtained show an increase by more than a factor of 100 in the power efficiency relative to a normal-incidence configuration for a 2.0-THz incident field.

Understanding the nonequilibrium behavior of quantum systems is a major goal of contemporary physics. Much research is currently focused on the dynamics of many-body systems in low-dimensional lattices following a quench, i.e., a sudden change of parameters. Already such a simple setting poses substantial theoretical challenges for the investigation of the real-time postquench quantum dynamics. In classical many-body systems, the Kolmogorov-Mehl-Johnson-Avrami model describes the phase transformation kinetics of a system that is quenched across a first-order phase transition. Here, we show that a similar approach can be applied for shedding light on the quench dynamics of an interacting gas of Rydberg atoms, which has become an important experimental platform for the investigation of quantum nonequilibrium effects. We are able to gain an analytical understanding of the time evolution following a sudden quench from an initial state devoid of Rydberg atoms and identify strikingly different behaviors of the excitation growth in the classical and quantum regimes. Our approach allows us to describe quenches near a nonequilibrium phase transition and provides an approximate analytical solution deep in the quantum domain.

We explore the phase diagram of a finite-sized dysprosium dipolar Bose-Einstein condensate in a cylindrical harmonic trap. We monitor the final state after the scattering length is lowered from the repulsive BEC regime to the quantum droplet regime. Either an adiabatic transformation between a BEC and a quantum droplet is obtained or, above a critical trap aspect ratio ${\lambda }_{\mathrm{c}}=1.87\left(14\right)$, a modulational instability results in the formation of multiple droplets. This is in full agreement with the predicted structure of the phase diagram with a crossover region below ${\lambda }_{\mathrm{c}}$ and a multistable region above. Our results provide the missing piece connecting the previously explored regimes resulting in a single or multiple dipolar quantum droplets.

Currently, there is no systematic way to describe a quantum process with memory solely in terms of experimentally accessible quantities. However, recent technological advances mean we have control over systems at scales where memory effects are non-negligible. The lack of such an operational description has hindered advances in understanding physical, chemical, and biological processes, where often unjustified theoretical assumptions are made to render a dynamical description tractable. This has led to theories plagued with unphysical results and no consensus on what a quantum Markov (memoryless) process is. Here, we develop a universal framework to characterize arbitrary non-Markovian quantum processes. We show how a multitime non-Markovian process can be reconstructed experimentally, and that it has a natural representation as a many-body quantum state, where temporal correlations are mapped to spatial ones. Moreover, this state is expected to have an efficient matrix-product-operator form in many cases. Our framework constitutes a systematic tool for the effective description of memory-bearing open-system evolutions.

Over the past decade, non-Hermitian, $\mathcal{PT}$-symmetric Hamiltonians have been investigated as candidates for both a fundamental, unitary, quantum theory and open systems with a nonunitary time evolution. In this paper, we investigate the implications of the former approach in the context of the latter. Motivated by the invariance of the $\mathcal{PT}$ (inner) product under time evolution, we discuss the dynamics of wave-function phases in a wide range of $\mathcal{PT}$-symmetric lattice models. In particular, we numerically show that, starting with a random initial state, a universal, gain-site location dependent locking between wave-function phases at adjacent sites occurs in the $\mathcal{PT}$-symmetry-broken region. Our results pave the way towards understanding the physically observable implications of time invariants in the nonunitary dynamics produced by $\mathcal{PT}$-symmetric Hamiltonians.

We discuss the connection between the incompatibility of quantum measurements, as captured by the notion of joint measurability, and the violation of Bell inequalities. Specifically, we explicitly present a given set of non-jointly-measurable positive-operator-value measures (POVMs) ${\mathcal{M}}_A$ with the following property. Considering a bipartite Bell test where Alice uses ${\mathcal{M}}_A$, then for any possible shared entangled state $\rho$ and any set of (possibly infinitely many) POVMs ${\mathcal{N}}_B$ performed by Bob, the resulting statistics admits a local model and can thus never violate any Bell inequality. This shows that quantum measurement incompatibility does not imply Bell nonlocality in general.

We study quantum channels that are close to another channel with weakly additive Holevo information, and we derive upper bounds on their classical capacity. Examples of channels with weakly additive Holevo information are entanglement-breaking channels, unital qubit channels, and Hadamard channels. Related to the method of approximate degradability, we define approximation parameters for each class above, which measure how close an arbitrary channel is to satisfying the respective property. This gives us upper bounds on the classical capacity in terms of functions of the approximation parameters, as well as an outer bound on the dynamic capacity region of a quantum channel. Since these parameters are defined in terms of the diamond distance, the upper bounds can be computed efficiently using semidefinite programming (SDP). We exhibit the usefulness of our method with two example channels: a convex mixture of amplitude damping and depolarizing noise and a composition of amplitude damping and dephasing noise. For both channels, our bounds perform well in certain regimes of the noise parameters in comparison to a recently derived SDP upper bound on the classical capacity. Along the way, we define the notion of a generalized channel divergence (which includes the diamond distance as an example), and we prove that for jointly covariant channels these quantities are maximized by purifications of a state invariant under the covariance group. This latter result may be of independent interest.

Based on shortcuts to adiabaticity and quantum Zeno dynamics, we present a protocol to implement quantum state transfer (QST) in a quantum spin-$\frac{1}{2}$ chain. In the protocol, the complex Hamiltonian of an $N$-site system is simplified, and a simple effective Hamiltonian is present. It is shown that only the control of the coupling strengths between the boundary spins and the bulk spins are required for QST. Numerical simulations demonstrate that the protocol possesses high efficiency and is robust against the decay and the fluctuations of the control fields. The protocol might provide an alternative choice for transferring quantum states via spin chain systems.

We study the effects of higher-order electronic correlations in the systems with particle-hole excited states using a relativistic hybrid method that combines configuration interaction and linearized coupled-cluster approaches. We find the configuration interaction part of the calculation sufficiently complete for eight electrons while maintaining good quality of the effective coupled-cluster potential for the core. Excellent agreement with experiment was demonstrated for a test case of ${\mathrm{La}}^{3+}$. We apply our method for homolog actinide ions ${\mathrm{Th}}^{4+}$ and ${\mathrm{U}}^{6+}$ which are of experimental interest due to a puzzle associated with the resonant excitation Stark ionization spectroscopy method. These ions are also of interest to actinide chemistry.

A step forward in Doppler-broadening thermometry is demonstrated using a comb-assisted cavity-ring-down spectroscopic approach applied to an isolated near-infrared line of carbon dioxide at thermodynamic equilibrium. Specifically, the line-shape of the $P_{\mathrm{e}}\left(12\right)$ line of the $\left(30012\right)\leftarrow \left(00001\right)$ band of $\mathrm{C}{\mathrm{O}}_2$ at 1.578 µm is accurately measured and its Doppler width extracted from a refined multispectrum fitting procedure accounting for the speed dependence of the relaxation rates, which were found to play a role even at the very low pressures explored, from 1 to 7 Pa. The thermodynamic gas temperature is retrieved with relative uncertainties of $8\times {10}^{-6}$ (type A) and $11\times {10}^{-6}$ (type B), which ranks the system at the first place among optical methods. Thanks to a measurement time of only $\approx 5\mathrm{h}$, the technique represents a promising pathway toward the optical determination of the thermodynamic temperature with a global uncertainty at the ${10}^{-6}$ level.

In this work we report progress in the development and implementation of quantum-mechanical methods for calculating bound ground and excited states of small atomic systems. The work concerns singlet states with the $L=1$ total orbital angular momentum ($P$ states). The method is based on the finite-nuclear-mass (non-Born-Oppenheimer; non-BO) approach and the use of all-particle explicitly correlated Gaussian functions for expanding the nonrelativistic wave function of the system. The development presented here includes derivation and implementation of algorithms for calculating the leading relativistic corrections for singlet states. The corrections are determined in the framework of the perturbation theory as expectation values of the corresponding effective operators using the non-BO wave functions. The method is tested in the calculations of the ten lowest ${}^{1}P$ states of the helium atom and the four lowest ${}^{1}P$ states of the beryllium atom.

We demonstrate stable and metastable vortex-bright solitons in a three-dimensional spin-orbit-coupled three-component hyperfine spin-1 Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) using numerical solution and variational approximation of a mean-field model. The spin-orbit coupling provides attraction to form vortex-bright solitons in both attractive and repulsive spinor BECs. The ground state of these vortex-bright solitons is axially symmetric for weak polar interaction. For a sufficiently strong ferromagnetic interaction, we observe the emergence of a fully asymmetric vortex-bright soliton as the ground state. We also numerically investigate moving solitons. The present mean-field model is not Galilean invariant, and we use a Galilean-transformed mean-field model for generating the moving solitons.

We measure complete and continuous Wigner functions of a two-level cesium atom in both a nearly pure state and highly mixed states. We apply the method [T. Tilma et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 117, 180401 (2016)] of strictly constructing continuous Wigner functions for qubit or spin systems. We find that the Wigner function of all pure states of a qubit has negative regions and the negativity completely vanishes when the purity of an arbitrary mixed state is less than $\frac{2}{3}$. We experimentally demonstrate these findings using a single cesium atom confined in an optical dipole trap, which undergoes a nearly pure dephasing process. Our method can be applied straightforwardly to multi-atom systems for measuring the Wigner function of their collective spin state.

We analyze spatiotemporal solitons in multimode optical fibers and demonstrate the existence of stable solitons, in a sharp contrast to earlier predictions of collapse of multidimensional solitons in three-dimensional media. We discuss the coexistence of blow-up solutions and collapse stabilization by a low-dimensional external potential in graded-index media, and also predict the existence of stable higher-order nonlinear waves such as dipole-mode spatiotemporal solitons. To support the main conclusions of our numerical studies we employ a variational approach and derive analytically the stability criterion for input powers for the collapse stabilization.

A technique to levitate and measure the three-dimensional position of micrometer-sized dielectric spheres with heterodyne detection is presented. The two radial degrees of freedom are measured by interfering light transmitted through the microsphere with a reference wavefront, while the axial degree of freedom is measured from the phase of the light reflected from the surface of the microsphere. This method pairs the simplicity and accessibility of single-beam optical traps to a measurement of displacement that is intrinsically calibrated by the wavelength of the trapping light and has exceptional immunity to stray light. A theoretical shot noise limit of $1.3\times {10}^{-13}\mathrm{m}/\sqrt{\mathrm{Hz}}$ for the radial degrees of freedom, and $3.0\times {10}^{-15}\mathrm{m}/\sqrt{\mathrm{Hz}}$ for the axial degree of freedom can be obtained in the system described. The measured acceleration noise in the radial direction is $7.5\times {10}^{-5}(\mathrm{m}/{\mathrm{s}}^2)/\sqrt{\mathrm{Hz}}$.

We theoretically study high-order optomechanically induced transparency (OMIT) process in a nonlinear Kerr resonator. A frequency shift induced by the Kerr effect, is identified for the optical cavity mode, which results in asymmetric OMIT windows of the signal and its higher-order sidebands. We also find that both the sideband amplitude and its associated group delay sensitively depend on the strength of the Kerr nonlinearity. This indicates the possibility to enhance or steer the performance of OMIT devices with various nonlinear optical cavities.

Ultracold atoms offer valuable opportunities where interparticle interactions can be controlled at will. In particular, by extinguishing the two-body interaction, one can realize unique systems governed by the three-body interaction, which is otherwise hidden behind the two-body interaction. Here we study one-dimensional bosons with a weak three-body attraction and show that they form few-body bound states as well as a many-body droplet stabilized by the quantum mechanical effect. Their binding energies relative to that of three bosons are all universal and the ground-state energy of the dilute droplet is found to grow exponentially as $E_N/E_3\to exp(8N^2/\sqrt{3}\pi )$ with increasing particle number $N\gg 1$. The realization of our system with coupled two-component bosons in an optical lattice is also discussed.

Based on a recently proposed model of physical reality and an underlying criterion of nonlocality for contexts [A. L. O. Bilobran and R. M. Angelo, Europhys. Lett. 112, 40005 (2015)], we introduce a quantifier of realism-based nonlocality for bipartite quantum states, a concept that is profoundly different from Bell nonlocality. We prove that this measure reduces to entanglement for pure states, thus being free of anomalies in arbitrary dimensions, and identify the class of states with null realism-based nonlocality. Then we show that such a notion of nonlocality can be positioned in a low level within the hierarchy of quantumness quantifiers, meaning that it can occur even for separable states. These results open a different perspective for nonlocality studies.

A simple procedure for obtaining superpositions of macroscopically distinct states is proposed and analyzed. We find that a thermal equilibrium state can be converted into such a state when a single global measurement of a macroscopic observable, such as the total magnetization, is made. This method is valid for systems with macroscopic degrees of freedom and finite (including zero) temperature. The superposition state is obtained with a high (low) probability when the measurement is made with a high (low) resolution. We find that this method is feasible in an experiment.