We theoretically investigate the electron momentum distributions in orthogonally polarized two-color pulses with the Coulomb-Volkov distorted-wave approximation (CVA) theory and focus on the role of the Coulomb potential in the electron momentum distributions by comparing the CVA results with the strong-field approximation (SFA) simulations. Our results show that in comparison with the SFA simulations, the electron momentum distributions in CVA are in better agreement with the experimental observations and the time-dependent Schrödinger equation calculations. By analyzing the phase of the dipole moment, we find that the change of the electron momentum distributions in CVA can be ascribed to the different Coulomb corrections of the phases, which give rise to an enhanced contribution from the forward-rescattering electron and, on the other hand, a decrease of the contribution from the direct electron in the presence of the Coulomb potential.

We study in detail a peculiar configuration of the Talbot-Lau matter wave interferometer, characterized by unequal distances between the two diffraction gratings and the observation plane. We refer to this apparatus as the “asymmetric Talbot-Lau setup.” Particular attention is given to its capabilities as an inertial sensor for particle and atomic beams, also in comparison with the classical moiré deflectometer. The present paper is motivated by possible experimental applications in the context of antimatter wave interferometry, including the measurement of the gravitational acceleration of antimatter particles. Therefore we focus our analysis on the current state of the art. To support our findings, we have also performed numerical simulations of realistic particle beams with varying speed distributions.

Bose-Einstein condensates of ultracold atoms can be used to sense fluctuations of the magnetic field by means of transitions into untrapped hyperfine states. It has been shown recently that counting the outcoupled atoms can yield the power spectrum of the magnetic noise. We calculate the spectral resolution function, which characterizes the condensate as a noise measurement device in this scheme. We use the description of the radio-frequency outcoupling scheme of an atom laser, which takes into account the gravitational acceleration. Employing both an intuitive and the exact three-dimensional and fully quantum mechanical approach, we derive the position-dependent spectral resolution function for condensates of different size and shape.

A theoretical model of a Bose-Einstein condensate with angular spin-orbit coupling has recently been proposed and it has been established that a half-skyrmion represents the ground state in a certain regime of spin-orbit coupling and interaction. Here we investigate low-lying excitations of this phase by using the Bogoliubov method and numerical simulations of the time-dependent Gross-Pitaevskii equation. We find that a sudden shift of the trap bottom results in a complex two-dimensional motion of the system's center of mass that is markedly different from the response of a competing phase, and comprises two dominant frequencies. Moreover, the breathing mode frequency of the half-skyrmion is set by both the spin-orbit coupling and the interaction strength, while in the competing state it takes a universal value. Effects of interactions are especially pronounced at the transition between the two phases.

In the generic formulation of optical interactions there is, beyond the familiar electric and magnetic multipolar forms of coupling, an additional diamagnetization term that rarely receives attention. In fact it can give rise to effects that should be observable in the general context of nonlinear optical spectroscopy, as well as scattering. A quantum electrodynamical analysis reveals features of special interest in two specific cases: two-photon absorption and Rayleigh scattering. Diamagnetic contributions are seen to be dispersion free with regards to the frequency of input radiation, and can represent unique interactions within optical absorption and emission processes. There is also a configuration in which diamagnetic couplings, which are quadratic in the magnetic field, can supersede those that are dependent linearly on the electric field strength, such as the electric dipole. In this connection the influence of retroreflected circularly polarized light, which leads to a local distance dependence in magnitude of the electromagnetic fields, produces conditions in which the diamagnetization response can become a prominent feature in two-photon absorption.

We investigate superradiance and subradiance of indistinguishable atoms with quantized motional states, starting with an initial total state that factorizes over the internal and external degrees of freedom of the atoms. Due to the permutational symmetry of the motional state, the cooperative spontaneous emission, governed by a recently derived master equation [F. Damanet et al., Phys. Rev. A 93, 022124 (2016)], depends only on two decay rates $\gamma$ and ${\gamma }_0$ and a single parameter ${\mathrm{\Delta }}_{\mathrm{dd}}$ describing the dipole-dipole shifts. We solve the dynamics exactly for $N=2$ atoms, numerically for up to 30 atoms, and obtain the large-$N$ limit by a mean-field approach. We find that there is a critical difference ${\gamma }_0-\gamma$ that depends on $N$ beyond which superradiance is lost. We show that exact nontrivial dark states (i.e., states other than the ground state with vanishing spontaneous emission) only exist for $\gamma ={\gamma }_0$ and that those states (dark when $\gamma ={\gamma }_0$) are subradiant when $\gamma <{\gamma }_0$.

In this article we present a numerical study of the collective dynamics in a population of coupled semiconductor lasers with a saturable absorber, operating in the excitable regime under the action of additive noise. We demonstrate that temporal and intensity synchronization takes place in a broad region of the parameter space and for various array sizes. The synchronization is robust and occurs even for a set of nonidentical coupled lasers. The cooperative nature of the system results in a self-organization process which enhances the coherence of the single element of the population too and can have broad impact for detection purposes, for building all-optical simulators of neural networks and in the field of photonics-based computation.

We present, experimentally and theoretically, a scheme for dressed-state electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) in a three-step cascade system in which a four-level system is mapped into an effective three-level system. Theoretical analysis reveals that the scheme provides coherent-state control via adiabatic following and a generalized protocol for light storage in uniform phase spin-waves that are insensitive to motional dephasing. The three-step driving enables a number of other features, including spatial selectivity of the excitation region within the atomic medium, and kick-free and Doppler-free excitation that produces narrow resonances in thermal vapor. As a proof of concept, we present an experimental demonstration of the generalized EIT scheme using the $6S_{1/2}\to 6P_{3/2}\to 7S_{1/2}\to 8P_{1/2}$ excitation path in thermal cesium vapor. This technique could be applied to cold and thermal ensembles to enable longer storage times for Rydberg polaritons.

We provide a graphical description of the entanglement of pure-state multiparty systems based on an analogy between a bipartite purity analysis and the centroid of a collection of point masses. This description applies to quantum systems with $N$ parties, each with an arbitrary number of (discrete) states. The case of $N$ qubits is highlighted for simplicity. This geometric description illustrates some of the restrictions in the form of inequalities that apply to entanglement in multiparty systems.

We predict a fundamental scaling law of Bloch oscillation in Weyl semimetals, which manifests that the transverse drift of quasiparticles accelerated bypassing a Weyl point exhibits asymptotically a linear log-log relation with respect to the minimal momentum measured from the Weyl point. This scaling relation is deeply connected to the topological monopole structure of Weyl points, thus being universal and providing a scheme to measure bulk topology of Weyl semimetals.

The computational difficulty of solving fully quantum many-body spin problems is a significant obstacle to understanding the behavior of strongly correlated quantum matter. Experimental ion trap quantum simulation is a promising approach for studying these lattice spin models, but has so far been limited to one-dimensional systems. This work argues that such quantum simulation techniques are extendable to a two-dimensional (2D) ion crystal confined in a radio-frequency (rf) trap. Using appropriately chosen parameters, driven ion motion due to the rf fields can be made small and will not limit the types of quantum spin models that can be experimentally encoded. The rf-driven motion is calculated to modestly reduce the stability region of a 2D crystal and must be considered when designing the 2D trap. The system will be scalable to 100+ quantum particles, far beyond the realm of classical intractability, while maintaining the traditional ion trap strengths of individual-ion control, long quantum coherence times, and site-resolved projective spin measurements.

Recently, we studied the magic wavelength for the atomic hydrogen $1S\text{−}2S$ transition [A. Kawasaki, Phys. Rev. A 92, 042507 (2015)]. An explicit summation over virtual atomic states of the discrete part of the hydrogen spectrum was performed to evaluate the atomic polarizability. In this paper, we supplement the contribution of the continuum part of the spectrum and add the reduced-mass correction. The magic wavelength, at which the lowest-order ac Stark shifts of the $1S$ and $2S$ states are equal, is found to be 514.6 nm. The ac Stark shift at the magic wavelength is $-221.6\mathrm{Hz}/(\mathrm{kW}/{\mathrm{cm}}^2)$, and the slope of the ac Stark shift at the magic wavelength under a change of the driving laser frequency is $-0.2157\mathrm{Hz}/[\mathrm{GHz}(\mathrm{kW}/{\mathrm{cm}}^2)]$.

In the framework of the signal processing approach to single-atom resonance fluorescence with spectral resolution, we diagrammatically derive an analytical formula for arbitrary-order spectral correlation functions of the scattered fields that pass through Fabry-Perot interferometers. Our general expression is then applied to study correlation signals in the limit of well separated spectral lines of the resonance fluorescence spectrum. In particular, we study the normalized second-order temporal intensity correlation functions in the case of the interferometers tuned to the components of the spectrum and obtain interferential corrections to the approximate results derived in the secular limit. In addition, we explore purely spectral correlations and show that they can fully be understood in terms of the two-photon cascades down the dressed state ladder.

We discuss the role of diffuse, Mie, and cooperative scattering on the radiation pressure force acting on the center of mass of a cloud of cold atoms. Even though a mean-field ansatz (the “timed Dicke state”), previously derived from a cooperative scattering approach, has been shown to agree satisfactorily with experiments, diffuse scattering also describes very well most features of the radiation pressure force on large atomic clouds. We compare in detail an incoherent, random walk model for photons and a diffraction approach to the more complete description based on coherently coupled dipoles. We show that a cooperative scattering approach, although it provides a quite complete description of the scattering process, is not necessary to explain the previous experiments on the radiation pressure force.

We study how well we can retrodict results of measurements made on a quantum system if we can make measurements on its final state. We know what measurements were made, but not their results. An initial examination shows that we can gain anywhere from no information to perfect information about the results of previous measurements, depending on the measurements and the initial state of the system. The case of two two-outcome measurements, the second of which is a projective measurement, is examined in some detail. We then look at a model of a qubit interferometer in which measurements are made in order to determine the path the qubit followed. The measurement made on the final state of the qubit depends on the information about previous measurement results that we are trying to determine. One can attempt to find the result of just one of the measurements or all of them or to find a measurement sequence that was not realized. We study all three possibilities.

We have proved that new randomness can be certified by partially free sources using $2\to 1$ quantum random access code (QRAC) in the framework of semi-device-independent (SDI) protocols [Y.-Q. Zhou, H.-W. Li, Y.-K. Wang, D.-D. Li, F. Gao, and Q.-Y. Wen, Phys. Rev. A 92, 022331 (2015)]. To improve the effectiveness of the randomness generation, here we propose the SDI randomness expansion using $3\to 1$ QRAC and obtain the corresponding classical and quantum bounds of the two-dimensional quantum witness. Moreover, we get the condition which should be satisfied by the partially free sources to successfully certify new randomness, and the analytic relationship between the certified randomness and the two-dimensional quantum witness violation.

Recently, two-photon six-qubit hyperentangled states were produced in experiment and they can improve the channel capacity of quantum communication largely. Here we present a scheme for the hyperentanglement purification of nonlocal two-photon systems in three degrees of freedom (DOFs), including the polarization, the first-longitudinal-momentum, and the second-longitudinal-momentum DOFs. Our hyperentanglement purification protocol (hyper-EPP) is constructed with two steps resorting to parity-check quantum nondemolition measurement on the three DOFs and swap gates, respectively. With these two steps, the bit-flip errors in the three DOFs can be corrected efficiently. Also, we show that using swap gates is a universal method for hyper-EPP in the polarization DOF and multiple-longitudinal-momentum DOFs. The implementation of our hyper-EPP is assisted by nitrogen-vacancy centers in optical microcavities, which could be achieved with current techniques. It is useful for long-distance high-capacity quantum communication with two-photon six-qubit hyperentanglement.

Charge-transfer $n$ partial cross sections have been calculated for collisions of ${\mathrm{Be}}^{4+}$ with $\mathrm{H}\left(1s\right)$ by means of a versatile lattice method that is applicable in a wide energy range (between 1 and 500 keV/u). The cross sections, which include up to the high-lying $n=8$ level, are compared to existing semiclassical calculations in order to quantify the accuracy of the results. The reliability of the lattice method at high impact energies is confirmed by comparison with classical trajectory Monte Carlo calculations. It is found that the $n$ partial cross sections larger than ${10}^{-18} {\mathrm{cm}}^2$, calculated using the lattice method, agree with differences smaller than 15% with those from the method considered the most accurate at each energy. The calculation yields as well accurate total electron capture cross sections, which are studied in detail at $E=100$ keV/u to obtain a converged value.