So-called average subsystem entropies are defined by first taking partial traces over some pure state to define density matrices, then calculating the subsystem entropies, and finally averaging over the pure states to define the average subsystem entropies. These quantities are standard tools in quantum information theory, most typically applied in bipartite systems. We shall first present some extensions to the usual bipartite analysis (including a calculation of the average tangle and a bound on the average concurrence), follow this with some useful results for tripartite systems, and finally extend the discussion to arbitrary multipartite systems. A particularly nice feature of tripartite and multipartite analyses is that this framework allows one to introduce an “environment” to which small subsystems can couple.

We consider a system consisting of a strongly interacting, ultracold unitary Fermi gas under harmonic confinement. Our analysis suggests the possibility of experimentally studying, in this system, an anisotropic shear viscosity tensor driven by the anisotropy in the trapping potential. In particular, we suggest that this experimental setup could mimic some features of anisotropic geometries that have recently been studied for strongly coupled field theories which have a dual gravitational description. Results using the AdS/CFT (anti-de Sitter/conformal field theory correspondence) in these theories show that in systems with a background linear potential, certain viscosity components can be made much smaller than the entropy density, parametrically violating the bound proposed by Kovtun, Son, and Starinets (KSS). This intuition, along with results from a Boltzmann analysis that we perform, suggests that a violation of the KSS bound can perhaps occur in the unitary Fermi gas system when it is subjected to a suitable anisotropic trapping potential which may be approximated to be linear in a suitable range of parameters. We give a concrete proposal for an experimental setup where an anisotropic shear viscosity tensor may arise. In such situations, it may also be possible to observe a reduction in the spin-1 component of the shear viscosity from its lowest value observed so far in ultracold Fermi gases. In extreme anisotropic situations, the reduction may be enough to reduce the shear viscosity to entropy ratio below the proposed KSS bound, although this regime is difficult to analyze in a theoretically controlled manner.

Near-resonant periodic driving of quantum systems promises the implementation of a large variety of novel quantum states, though their preparation and measurement remains challenging. We address these aspects in a model system consisting of interacting fermions in a periodically driven array of double wells created by an optical lattice. The singlet and triplet fractions and the double occupancy of the Floquet states are measured and their behavior as a function of the interaction strength is analyzed in the high- and low-frequency regimes. We demonstrate full control of the Floquet state population and find suitable ramping protocols and time scales that adiabatically connect the initial ground state to different targeted Floquet states. The micromotion that exactly describes the time evolution of the system within one driving cycle is observed. Additionally, we provide an analytic description of the model and compare it to numerical simulations.

We investigate the correspondence between the tight-binding Floquet Hamiltonian of a periodically modulated honeycomb lattice and the Haldane model. We show that—though the two systems share the same topological phase diagram, as reported in a breakthrough experiment with ultracold atoms in a stretched honeycomb lattice [G. Jotzu et al., Nature (London) 515, 237 (2014)]—the corresponding Hamiltonians are not equivalent, the one of the shaken lattice presenting a much richer structure.

We investigate a system of two- and three-body constrained dipolar bosons in a pair of one-dimensional optical lattices coupled to each other by nonlocal dipole-dipole interactions. Assuming attractive dipole-dipole interactions, we obtain the ground-state phase diagram of the system by employing the cluster mean-field theory. The competition between the repulsive on-site and attractive nearest-neighbor interactions between the chains yields three kinds of superfluids, namely, the trimer superfluid, the pair superfluid, and the usual single-particle superfluid along with the insulating Mott phase at the commensurate density. Additionally, we realize the simultaneous existence of Mott insulator and superfluid phases for the two- and three-body constrained bosons, respectively. We also analyze the stability of these quantum phases in the presence of a harmonic trap potential.

We consider the Heisenberg-Euler action for an electromagnetic field in vacuum, which includes quantum corrections to the Maxwell equations induced by photon-photon scattering. We show that, in some configurations, the plane monochromatic waves become unstable, due to the appearance of secularities in the dynamical equations. These secularities can be treated using a multiscale approach, introducing a slow time variable. The amplitudes of the plane electromagnetic waves satisfy a system of ordinary differential nonlinear equations in the slow time. The analysis of this system shows that, due to the effect of photon-photon scattering, in the unstable configurations the electromagnetic waves oscillate periodically between left-hand-sided and right-hand-sided polarizations. Finally, we discuss the physical implications of this finding and the possibility of disclosing traces of this effect in optical experiments.

The transition dynamics of photons between an optical soliton in a nonlinear dielectric waveguide and a spatially coupled surface-plasmon excitation on a parallel flat metal surface can be formulated in analogy to that of a Josephson junction of two-level (double-well) Bose-Einstein condensates, albeit with a nonlinear coupling that inherently depends on the population imbalance of the levels. The present work demonstrates that asymmetric Rosen-Zener–like transitions can be obtained through this optical Josephson junction, by turning on and off the coupling across a hyperbolically varying separation between the soliton and the surface-plasmon. The transitions can generate full population transfer, population splitting, or merging between the quasistationary initial and final states, which are defined by a fixed population imbalance in the decoupled limit. Transitions from a pure soliton or pure surface-plasmon initial state are found to be robust against the relative phase, whereas the transitions from an initial state with mixed population depend strongly on the relative phase. The soliton–surface-plasmon system also bears similarities to the spatially coupled optical waveguides which are introduced further as the classical analogs of the spatial adiabatic passage and stimulated Raman adiabatic passage mechanisms in quantum and atom optics.

We generalize the operational quasiprobability involving sequential measurements proposed by Ryu et al. [Phys. Rev. A 88, 052123 (2013)] to a continuous-variable system. The quasiprobabilities in quantum optics are incommensurate, i.e., they represent a given physical observation in different mathematical forms from their classical counterparts, making it difficult to operationally interpret their negative values. Our operational quasiprobability is commensurate, enabling one to compare quantum and classical statistics on the same footing. We show that the operational quasiprobability can be negative against the hypothesis of macrorealism for various states of light. Quadrature variables of light are our examples of continuous variables. We also compare our approach to the Glauber-Sudarshan $\mathcal{P}$ function. In addition, we suggest an experimental scheme to sequentially measure the quadrature variables of light.

We investigate the high-order-harmonic generation (HHG) in doped semiconductors. The HHG is simulated with the single-electron time-dependent Schrödinger equation. The results show that the high-order harmonics in the second plateau generated from the doped semiconductors is about one to three orders of magnitude higher than those from the undoped semiconductor. The results are explained based on the analysis of the energy-band structure and the time-dependent population imaging. Our paper indicates that doping can effectively control the HHG in semiconductors.

We report on the creation and manipulation of three-dimensional (3D) electron vortices from femtosecond multiphoton ionization of atoms. Vortex-shaped photoelectron momentum distributions arise from the superposition of two time-delayed free-electron wave packets with different magnetic quantum numbers. In the experiment, pairs of time-delayed counter-rotating circularly polarized (CRCP) femtosecond laser pulses, generated from a polarization-shaped supercontinuum source, are used to ionize potassium atoms. The resulting 3D electron vortices are reconstructed tomographically from a set of velocity map imaging measurements. By variation of the time delay, the helicity, and the spectral bandwidth of the CRCP pulse sequence, we control the radial vortex shape. Absorption of another photon in the continuum changes the $c_6$ azimuthal symmetry of the threshold vortex into $c_8$ for above-threshold ionization. Electron vortices from nonperturbative excitation show $c_4$ azimuthal symmetry and a $\pi$-phase jump in the polar direction. Determination of the relative phase of the superposition state allows us to reconstruct a free-electron wave function.

We numerically explore the long-time expansion of a one-dimensional Bose-Einstein condensate in a disorder potential employing the Gross-Pitaevskii equation. The goal is to search for unique signatures of Anderson localization in the presence of particle-particle interactions. Using typical experimental parameters, we show that the time scale for which the nonequilibrium dynamics of the interacting system begins to diverge from the noninteracting system exceeds the observation times up to now accessible in the experiment. We find evidence that the long-time evolution of the wave packet is characterized by (sub)diffusive spreading and a growing effective localization length, suggesting that interactions destroy Anderson localization.

In the framework of the Gross-Pitaevskii equation, we study the formation and stability of effectively two-dimensional solitons in dipolar Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs), with dipole moments polarized at an arbitrary angle $\theta$ relative to the direction normal to the system's plane. Using numerical methods and the variational approximation, we demonstrate that unstable Townes solitons, created by the contact attractive interaction, may be completely stabilized (with an anisotropic shape) by the dipole-dipole interaction (DDI), in the interval ${\theta }^{\text{cr}}<\theta \le \pi /2$. The stability boundary ${\theta }^{\text{cr}}$ weakly depends on the relative strength of the DDI, remaining close to the magic angle ${\theta }_m=arccos(1/\sqrt{3})$. The results suggest that DDIs provide a generic mechanism for the creation of stable BEC solitons in higher dimensions.

A fundamental quantity in multiple scattering is the transport mean free path the inverse of which describes the scattering strength of a sample. In this paper, we emphasize the importance of an appropriate description of the effective refractive index $n_{\mathrm{eff}}$ in multiple light scattering to accurately describe the light transport in dense photonic glasses. Using $n_{\mathrm{eff}}$ as calculated by the energy-density coherent-potential approximation we are able to predict the transport mean free path of monodisperse photonic glasses. This model without any fit parameter is in qualitative agreement with numerical simulations and in fair quantitative agreement with spectrally resolved coherent backscattering measurements on new specially synthesized polystyrene photonic glasses. These materials exhibit resonant light scattering perturbed by strong near-field coupling, all captured within the model. Our model might be used to maximize the scattering strength of high index photonic glasses, which are a key in the search for Anderson localization of light in three dimensions.

We theoretically investigate the quantum scattering of a weak coherent input field interacting with an ensemble of $\mathrm{\Lambda }$-type three-level atoms coupled to a one-dimensional waveguide. With an effective non-Hermitian Hamiltonian, we study the collective interaction between the atoms mediated by the waveguide mode. In our scheme, the atoms are randomly placed in the lattice along the axis of the one-dimensional waveguide. Many interesting optical properties occur in our waveguide-atom system, such as electromagnetically induced transparency. We quantify the influence of decoherence originating from both dephasing and population relaxation, and analyze the effect of the inhomogeneous broadening on the transport properties of the incident field. Moreover, we observe that strong photon-photon correlation with quantum beats can be generated in the off-resonant case, which provides an effective method for producing nonclassical light in experiment. With remarkable progress in waveguide-emitter systems, our scheme may be experimentally feasible in the near future.

We show that the scheme of cascaded four-wave-mixing (FWM) processes can be a promising alternative method for generating quadripartite entanglement. This scheme utilizes the strongly entangled twin beams produced by a FWM process as seed beams for another two FWM processes. To present the entanglement properties of this scheme, we verify that the generated state is a $\mathcal{H}$-graph state by using the graphical calculus for Gaussian pure states at first. Then we proceed with investigating the possibility of this scheme for generating quadripartite entanglement by applying the positivity under partial transposition criterion. It is verified that quadripartite entanglement exists for the whole gain region in this scheme. In addition, the possibilities of generating bipartite and tripartite entanglement are studied as well to reveal the entanglement structure. Our results pave the way to experimentally generate quadripartite entanglement based on cascaded FWM processes.

The family of solutions to the Dirac equation for an electron moving in an electromagnetic lattice with the chiral structure created by counterpropagating circularly polarized plane electromagnetic waves is obtained. At any nonzero quasimomentum, the dispersion equation has two solutions which specify bispinor wave functions describing electron states with different energies and mean values of momentum and spin operators. The inversion of the quasimomentum results in two other linearly independent solutions. These four basic wave functions are uniquely defined by eight complex scalar functions (structural functions), which serve as convenient building blocks of the relations describing the electron properties. These properties are illustrated in graphical form over a wide range of quasimomenta. The superpositions of two basic wave functions describing different spin states and corresponding to (i) the same quasimomentum (unidirectional electron states with the spin precession) and (ii) the two equal-in-magnitude but oppositely directed quasimomenta (bidirectional electron states) are also treated.

The weak interaction does not conserve parity and therefore induces energy shifts in chiral enantiomers that should in principle be detectable in molecular spectra. Unfortunately, the magnitude of the expected shifts are small and in spectra of a mixture of enantiomers, the energy shifts are not resolvable. We propose a nuclear-magnetic-resonance (NMR) experiment in which we titrate the chirality (enantiomeric excess) of a solvent and measure the diasteriomeric splitting in the spectra of a chiral solute in order to search for an anomalous offset due to parity nonconservation (PNC). We present a proof-of-principle experiment in which we search for PNC in the ${}^{13}\mathrm{C}$ resonances of small molecules, and use the ${}^1\mathrm{H}$ resonances, which are insensitive to PNC, as an internal reference. We set a constraint on molecular PNC in ${}^{13}\mathrm{C}$ chemical shifts at a level of ${10}^{-5}$ ppm, and provide a discussion of important considerations in the search for molecular PNC using NMR spectroscopy.

We revisit the Fermi two-atom problem in the framework of disordered systems. In our model, we consider a two-qubit system linearly coupled with a quantum massless scalar field. We analyze the energy transfer between the qubits under different experimental perspectives. In addition, we assume that the coefficients of the Klein-Gordon equation are random functions of the spatial coordinates. The disordered medium is modeled by a centered, stationary, and Gaussian process. We demonstrate that the classical notion of causality emerges only in the wave zone in the presence of random fluctuations of the light cone. Possible repercussions are discussed.

It has been known since the early days of quantum mechanics that hyperbolic secant pulses possess the unique property that they can perform full-cycle Rabi oscillations on two-level quantum systems independently of the pulse detuning. More recently, it was realized that they induce detuning-controlled phases without changing state populations. Here, we experimentally demonstrate the properties of hyperbolic secant pulses on superconducting transmon qubits and contrast them with the more commonly used Gaussian and square waves. We further show that these properties can be exploited to implement phase gates, nominally without exiting the computational subspace. This enables us to demonstrate a microwave-driven $Z$ rotation with a single control parameter, the detuning.