We consider a system where an optical cavity mode is parametrically coupled to a mechanical oscillator. A laser beam driving the cavity at its resonance frequency will acquire red- and blue-shifted sidebands due to noise in the position of the mechanical oscillator. In a classical theory without noise in the electromagnetic field, the powers of these sidebands are of equal magnitude. In a quantum theory, however, an asymmetry between the sidebands can be resolved when the oscillator's average number of vibrational excitations (phonons) becomes small, i.e., comparable to 1. We discuss the interpretation of this sideband asymmetry in a heterodyne photodetection measurement scheme and show that it depends on the choice of detector model. In the optical regime, standard photodetection theory leads to a photocurrent noise spectrum given by normal- and time-ordered expectation values. The sideband asymmetry is in that case a direct reflection of the quantum asymmetry of the position noise spectrum of the mechanical oscillator. Conversely, for a detector that measures symmetric, nonordered expectation values, we show that the sideband asymmetry can be traced back to quantum optomechanical interference terms. This ambiguity in interpretation applies not only to mechanical oscillators, but to any degree of freedom that couples linearly to noise in the electromagnetic field. Finally, we also compare the quantum theory to a fully classical model, where sideband asymmetry can arise from classical optomechanical interference terms. We show that, due to the oscillator's lack of zero-point motion in a classical theory, the sidebands in the photocurrent spectrum differ qualitatively from those of a quantum theory at sufficiently low temperatures. We discuss the observable consequences of this deviation between classical and quantum theories.

We demonstrate that optical transmission matrices (TMs) provide a powerful tool to extract the photonic strength of disordered complex media, independent of surface effects. We measure the TM of a strongly scattering GaP nanowire medium and compare the singular value density of the measured TM to a random-matrix-based wave transport model. By varying the transport mean free path and effective refractive index in the model, we retrieve the photonic strength. From separate numerical simulations we conclude that the photonic strength derived from TM statistics is insensitive to the surface reflection at rear surface of the sample.

A formula for determining the electronic stopping power and the transport cross section in electron-ion binary collisions is derived from the induced density for spherically symmetric potentials using the partial-wave expansion. In contrast to the previous one found in many textbooks, the present formula converges to the Bethe and Bloch stopping-power formulas at high ion velocities and agrees rather well with experimental stopping-power data, as shown here for Al, C, and ${\mathrm{H}}_2\mathrm{O}$ targets. It can be employed in plasma physics and particularly in any application that requires electronic stopping-power values of quasifree electrons with high accuracy.

We have studied the cooling dynamics, formation process, and geometric structure of mesoscopic crystals of externally produced magnesium ions in a Penning trap. We present a cooling model and measurements for a combination of buffer gas cooling and laser cooling which has been found to reduce the ion kinetic energy by eight orders of magnitude from several hundreds of eV to $\mu \mathrm{eV}$ and below within seconds. With ion numbers of the order of $1\times {10}^3$ to $1\times {10}^5$, such cooling leads to the formation of ion Coulomb crystals which display a characteristic shell structure in agreement with the theory of non-neutral plasmas. We show the production and characterization of two-species ion crystals as a means of sympathetic cooling of ions lacking a suitable laser-cooling transition.

The method of the envelope Hamiltonian [K. Toyota, U. Saalmann, and J. M. Rost, New J. Phys. 17, 073005 (2015)] is applied to further study a detachment dynamics of a model negative ion in one dimension in the high-frequency regime. This method is based on the Floquet approach, but the time dependency of an envelope function is explicitly kept for arbitrary pulse durations. Therefore, it is capable of describing not only a photon absorption or emission, but also a nonadiabatic transition which is induced by the time-varying envelope of the pulse. It was shown that the envelope Hamiltonian accurately retrieves the results obtained by the time-dependent Schrödinger equation, and the underlying physics were well understood by the adiabatic approximation based on the envelope Hamiltonian. In this paper, we explore two more aspects of the detachment dynamics, which were not considered in our previous work. First, we determine the features of both a spatial and temporal interference of photoelectron wave packets in a photon-absorption process. We conclude that both of the interference mechanisms are universal in ionization dynamics in the high-frequency regime. Second, we extract a pulse duration which maximizes a yield of the nonadiabatic transition as a function of a pulse duration. It is shown that it becomes maximum when the pulse duration is comparable to a time scale of an electron.

In a recent experiment (Z. Wu, L. Zhang, W. Sun, X.-T. Xu, B.-Z. Wang, S.-C. Ji, Y. Deng, S. Chen, X.-J. Liu, and J.-W. Pan, arXiv:1511.08170 [cond-mat.quant-gas]), a Raman-assisted two-dimensional spin-orbit coupling has been realized for a Bose-Einstein condensate in an optical lattice potential. In light of this exciting progress, we study in detail key properties of the system. As the Raman lasers inevitably couple atoms to high-lying bands, the behaviors of the system in both the single- and many-particle sectors are significantly affected. In particular, the high-band effects enhance the plane-wave phase and lead to the emergence of “roton” gaps at low Zeeman fields. Furthermore, we identify high-band-induced topological phase boundaries in both the single-particle and the quasiparticle spectra. We then derive an effective two-band model, which captures the high-band physics in the experimentally relevant regime. Our results not only offer valuable insights into the two-dimensional lattice spin-orbit coupling, but also provide a systematic formalism to model high-band effects in lattice systems with Raman-assisted spin-orbit couplings.

We demonstrate quantum resonance ratchets created with Bose-Einstein condensates exposed to pulses of an off-resonant standing light wave. We show how some of the basic properties of the ratchets are controllable through the creation of different initial states of the system. In particular, our results prove that through an appropriate choice of initial state it is possible to reduce the extent to which the ratchet state changes with respect to time. We develop a simple theory to explain our results and indicate how ratchets might be used as part of a matter-wave interferometer or quantum random walk experiment.

We consider the problem of gambling on a quantum experiment and enforce rational behavior by a few rules. These rules yield, in the classical case, the Bayesian theory of probability via duality theorems. In our quantum setting, they yield the Bayesian theory generalized to the space of Hermitian matrices. This very theory is quantum mechanics: in fact, we derive all its four postulates from the generalized Bayesian theory. This implies that quantum mechanics is self-consistent. It also leads us to reinterpret the main operations in quantum mechanics as probability rules: Bayes' rule (measurement), marginalization (partial tracing), independence (tensor product). To say it with a slogan, we obtain that quantum mechanics is the Bayesian theory in the complex numbers.

The accurate and reliable characterization of quantum dynamical processes underlies efforts to validate quantum technologies, where discrimination between competing models of observed behaviors inform efforts to fabricate and operate qubit devices. We present a protocol for quantum channel discrimination that leverages advances in direct characterization of quantum dynamics (DCQD) codes. We demonstrate that DCQD codes enable selective process tomography to improve discrimination between entangling and correlated quantum dynamics. Numerical simulations show selective process tomography requires only a few measurement configurations to achieve a low false alarm rate and that the DCQD encoding improves the resilience of the protocol to hidden sources of noise. Our results show that selective process tomography with DCQD codes is useful for efficiently distinguishing sources of correlated crosstalk from uncorrelated noise in current and future experimental platforms.

The goal of this work is to provide a general security analysis tool, namely, the quantum random oracle (QRO), for facilitating the security analysis of quantum cryptographic protocols, especially protocols based on quantum one-way function. QRO is used to model quantum one-way function and different queries to QRO are used to model quantum attacks. A typical application of quantum one-way function is the quantum digital signature, whose progress has been hampered by the slow pace of the experimental realization. Alternatively, we use the QRO model to analyze the provable security of a quantum digital signature scheme and elaborate the analysis procedure. The QRO model differs from the prior quantum-accessible random oracle in that it can output quantum states as public keys and give responses to different queries. This tool can be a test bed for the cryptanalysis of more quantum cryptographic protocols based on the quantum one-way function.

We propose an entropic measure of nonclassical correlations in general mixed states of fermion systems, based on the loss of information due to the unread measurement of the occupancy of single-particle states of a given basis. When minimized over all possible single-particle bases, the measure reduces to an entanglement entropy for pure states and vanishes only for states which are diagonal in a Slater determinant basis. The approach is also suitable for states having definite number parity yet not necessarily a fixed particle number, in which case the minimization can be extended to all bases related through a Bogoliubov transformation if quasiparticle mode measurements are also considered. General stationary conditions for determining the optimizing basis are derived. For a mixture of a general pure state with the maximally mixed state, a general analytic evaluation of the present measure and optimizing basis is provided, which shows that nonentangled mixed states may nonetheless exhibit a nonzero information loss.

We present a high-precision measurement of the $3d{}^{2}D_{3/2}$–state lifetime in a single trapped ${}^{40}\mathrm{Ca}^{+}$. The measurement was performed using a high-efficiency quantum-state detection technique to monitor quantum jumps and a high-precision and highly synchronous measurement sequence for laser control. A feature in our measurement is the pumping rate of the 729-nm laser that was corrected in a real-time way. The $3d{}^{2}D_{3/2}$–state lifetime was obtained through the measurement of the spontaneous decay rate after incoherent shelving of the ion to the $3d{}^{2}D_{3/2}$ state with a wait time. Systematic errors, such as collisions with background gases, heating effects, impurity components, the shelving and pumping rates, and state detection, were carefully analyzed and estimated. We determined an improved value of the $3d{}^{2}D_{3/2}$–state lifetime to be ${\tau }_{3/2}=1.195\left(8\right)$ s. Furthermore, the $3d{}^{2}D_{3/2}\to 4s{}^{2}S_{1/2}$ quadrupole transition matrix element was measured to be $S_{ki}=7.936\left(26\right)e{a}_0^2$, and the ratio between the lifetimes of $3d{}^2{D}_{3/2}$ and $3d{}^2{D}_{5/2}$ was determined to be 1.018(11). Our method can be universally applied to lifetime measurements of other single ions and atoms with a similar structure.

We present measurements of the optical Feshbach resonances (OFRs) of ${}^{174}\mathrm{Yb}$ atoms for the intercombination transition. We measure the photoassociation (PA) spectra of a pure ${}^{174}\mathrm{Yb}$ Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) and determine the dependence of OFRs on PA laser intensities and frequencies for four least-bound vibrational levels near the intercombination transition. We confirm that our measurements are consistent with the temporal decay of a BEC subjected to a PA beam in the vicinity of the fourth vibrational level from the dissociation limit.

In molecular photodissociation, some specific combinations of laser parameters (wavelength and intensity) lead to unexpected zero-width resonances (ZWRs) with, in principle, infinite lifetimes. Their potential to induce basic quenching mechanisms has recently been devised in the laser control of vibrational cooling through filtration strategies [O. Atabek et al., Phys. Rev. A 87, 031403(R) (2013)]. A full quantum adiabatic control theory based on the adiabatic Floquet Hamiltonian is developed to show how a laser pulse could be envelope-shaped and frequency-chirped so as to protect a given initial vibrational state against dissociation, taking advantage of its continuous transport on the corresponding ZWR all along the pulse duration. As compared with previous control scenarios that actually suffered from nonadiabatic contamination, drastically different and much more efficient filtration goals are achieved. A semiclassical analysis helps us to find and interpret a complete map of ZWRs in the laser parameter plane. In addition, the choice of a given ZWR path, among the complete series identified by the semiclassical approach, turns out to be crucial for the cooling scheme, targeting a single vibrational state population left at the end of the pulse, while all others have almost completely decayed. The illustrative example, which has the potential to be transposed to other diatomics, is ${\mathrm{Na}}_2$ prepared by photoassociation in vibrationally hot but translationally and rotationally cold states.

We consider a homogeneous, balanced gas of strongly interacting fermions in two spin states interacting through a large scattering length. Finite-range corrections are needed for a quantitative description of data which experiments and numerical simulations have provided. We use a perturbative field-theoretical framework and a tool called the operator product expansion (OPE), which together allow for the expression of finite-range corrections to the universal relations and momentum distribution. By using the OPE, we derive the $1/k^6$ part of the momentum tail, which is related to the sum of the derivative of the energy with respect to the finite range and the averaged kinetic energy of opposite spin pairs. By comparing the $1/k^4$ term and the $1/k^6$ correction in the momentum distribution to provided quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) data, we show that including the $1/k^6$ part offers marked improvements. Our field-theoretical approach allows for a clear understanding of the role of the scattering length and finite effective range in the universal relations and the momentum distribution.

We numerically study the temporal evolution of a black-hole laser configuration displaying a pair of black- and white-hole horizons in a flowing atomic condensate. This configuration is initially prepared starting from a homogeneous flow via a suitable space-dependent change of the interaction constant and the evolution is then followed up to long times. Depending on the values of the system parameters, the system typically either converges to the lowest-energy solution by evaporating away the horizons or displays a continuous and periodic coherent emission of solitons. By making a physical comparison with optical laser devices, we identify the latter regime of continuous emission of solitons as the proper black-hole laser effect.

We investigate the dynamics of the Weyl quasiparticles emerged in an optical lattice where the topological Weyl semimetal and trivial band insulator phases can be adjusted with the on-site energy. The evolution of the density distribution is demonstrated to have an anomalous velocity in the Weyl semimetal but a steady Zitterbewegung effect in the band insulator. Our analysis demonstrates that the chirality of the system can be directly determined from the positions of the atomic center of mass. Furthermore, the amplitude and the period of the relativistic Zitterbewegung oscillations are shown to be observable with the time-of-flight experiments.