We compute the informational power for the Hoggar symmetric informationally complete positive operator-valued measure (SIC-POVM) in dimension eight, i.e., the classical capacity of a quantum-classical channel generated by this measurement. We show that the states constituting a maximally informative ensemble form a twin Hoggar SIC-POVM being the image of the original one under a conjugation.

We show that weak measurement leads to unconventional quantum Zeno dynamics with Raman-like transitions via virtual states outside the Zeno subspace. We extend this concept into the realm of non-Hermitian dynamics by showing that the stochastic competition between measurement and a system's own dynamics can be described by a non-Hermitian Hamiltonian. We obtain a solution for ultracold bosons in a lattice and show that a dark state of tunneling is achieved as a steady state in which the observable's fluctuations are zero and tunneling is suppressed by destructive matter-wave interference.

A relativistic quantum field theory with nontrivial background fields is developed and applied to study waves in plasmas. The effective action of the electromagnetic 4-potential is calculated ab initio from the standard action of scalar QED using path integrals. The resultant effective action is gauge invariant and contains nonlocal interactions, from which gauge bosons acquire masses without breaking the local gauge symmetry. To demonstrate how the general theory can be applied, we give two examples: a cold unmagnetized plasma and a cold uniformly magnetized plasma. Using these two examples, we show that all linear waves well known in classical plasma physics can be recovered from relativistic quantum results when taking the classical limit. In the opposite limit, classical wave dispersion relations are modified substantially. In unmagnetized plasmas, longitudinal waves propagate with nonzero group velocities even when plasmas are cold. In magnetized plasmas, anharmonically spaced Bernstein waves persist even when plasmas are cold. These waves account for cyclotron absorption features observed in spectra of x-ray pulsars. Moreover, cutoff frequencies of the two nondegenerate electromagnetic waves are red-shifted by different amounts. These corrections need to be taken into account in order to correctly interpret diagnostic results in laser plasma experiments.

The occurrence of entanglement sudden death in the evolution of a bipartite system depends on both the initial state and the channel responsible for the evolution. An extreme case is that of entanglement-breaking channels, which are channels that, acting on only one of the subsystems, drives them to full disentanglement, regardless of the initial state. In general, one can find certain combinations of initial states and channels acting on one or both subsystems that can result in entanglement sudden death or not. Neither the channel nor the initial state are responsible for this effect but their combination. In this paper we show that, for two entangled qubits, when entanglement sudden death occurs, the evolution can be mapped to that of an effective entanglement-breaking channel on a modified initial state. Our results allow to anticipate which states will suffer entanglement sudden death or not for a given evolution. An experiment with polarization-entangled photons demonstrates the utility of this result in a variety of cases.

Heterogeneous bipartite quantum pure states, composed of two subsystems with a different number of levels, cannot have both reductions maximally mixed. In this work, we demonstrate the existence of a wide range of highly entangled states of heterogeneous multipartite systems consisting of $N>2$ parties such that every reduction to one and two parties is maximally mixed. Two constructions of generating genuinely multipartite maximally entangled states of heterogeneous systems for an arbitrary number of subsystems are presented. Such states are related to quantum error correction codes over mixed alphabets and mixed orthogonal arrays. Additionally, we show the advantages of considering heterogeneous systems in practical implementations of multipartite steering.

Using circuit QED, we consider the measurement of a superconducting transmon qubit via a coupled microwave resonator. For ideally dispersive coupling, ringing up the resonator produces coherent states with frequencies matched to transmon energy states. Realistic coupling is not ideally dispersive, however, so transmon-resonator energy levels hybridize into joint eigenstate ladders of the Jaynes–Cummings type. Previous work has shown that ringing up the resonator approximately respects this ladder structure to produce a coherent state in the eigenbasis (a dressed coherent state). We numerically investigate the validity of this coherent-state approximation to find two primary deviations. First, resonator ring-up leaks small stray populations into eigenstate ladders corresponding to different transmon states. Second, within an eigenstate ladder the transmon nonlinearity shears the coherent state as it evolves. We then show that the next natural approximation for this sheared state in the eigenbasis is a dressed squeezed state and derive simple evolution equations for such states by using a hybrid phase–Fock-space description.

We adapt the generalized Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov (HFB) method to an interacting many-phonon system free of impurities. The many-phonon system is obtained from applying the Lee-Low-Pine (LLP) transformation to the Fröhlich model which describes a mobile impurity coupled to noninteracting phonons. We specialize our general HFB description of the Fröhlich polaron to Bose polarons in quasi-one-dimensional cold-atom mixtures. The LLP-transformed many-phonon system distinguishes itself with an artificial phonon-phonon interaction which is very different from the usual two-body interaction. We use the quasi-one-dimensional model, which is free of an ultraviolet divergence that exists in higher dimensions, to better understand how this unique interaction affects polaron states and how the density and pair correlations inherent to the HFB method conspire to create a polaron ground state with an energy in good agreement with and far closer to the prediction from Feynman's variational path integral approach than mean-field theory where HFB correlations are absent.

We investigate a two-level atom in the field of a strong laser pulse. The resulting time-dependent polarization is the source of a radiation the frequency components of which are essentially harmonics of the driving field's carrier frequency. The time evolution of this secondary radiation is analyzed in terms of the expectation values of the photon-number operators for a large number of electromagnetic modes that are initially in the vacuum state. Our method is based on a multimode version of the Jaynes-Cummings-Paul model and can be generalized to different radiating systems as well. We show that, after the exciting pulse, the final distribution of the photon numbers is close to the conventional (Fourier-transform-based) power spectrum of the secondary radiation. The details of the high-order-harmonic spectra (HHG spectra) are also analyzed; for many-cycle excitations a clear physical interpretation is given in terms of the Floquet quasienergies. A first step towards the determination of the photon statistics of the high-order-harmonic modes reveals states with slightly super-Poissonian distribution.

As a probe to explore the ability of invisibility cloaks to conceal objects in the quantum mechanics domain, we study the spontaneous emission rate of an excited two-level atom in the vicinity of an ideal invisibility cloaking. On this base, first, a canonical quantization scheme is presented for the electromagnetic field interacting with atomic systems in an anisotropic, inhomogeneous, and absorbing magnetodielectric medium which can suitably be used for studying the influence of arbitrary invisibility cloak on the atomic radiative properties. The time dependence of the atomic subsystem is obtained in the Schrodinger picture. By introducing a modified set of the spherical wave-vector functions, the Green tensor of the system is calculated via exact and discrete methods. In this formalism, the decay rate and as well the emission pattern of the aforementioned atom are computed analytically for both weak and strong coupling interaction, and then numerically calculations are done to demonstrate the performances of cloaking in the quantum mechanics domain. Special attention is paid to different possible orientations and locations of the atomic system near the spherical invisibility cloaking. Results in the presence and the absence of the invisibility cloak are compared. We find that the cloak works very well far from its resonance frequency to conceal a macroscopic object, whereas at near the resonance frequency the object is more visible than the situation where the object is not covered by the cloak.

Recently several techniques demonstrated the production of elliptically polarized high harmonics. One of these techniques consists of the interaction in a noble gas of two-color laser beams having orthogonal linear polarizations. Here we present the theoretical explanation of such a result observed in Lambert et al. [Nat. Commun. 6, 6167 (2015)]. Numerical calculations based on the nonperturbative light-atom interaction theory reproduce well the experimental data. The degree of polarization is analyzed for different harmonic orders and found to be high. With the help of a simplified theoretical model it is shown that the degree of harmonic ellipticity depends mainly on the population of atomic state sublevels with different angular momentum projections.

We consider harmonics generation and wave mixing by two-color multiphoton resonant excitation of three-level atoms and molecules in strong laser fields. The coherent part of the spectra corresponding to multicolor harmonics generation is investigated. The obtained analytical results on the basis of a generalized rotating wave approximation are in a good agreement with numerical calculations. The results applied to the hydrogen atoms and homonuclear diatomic molecular ions show that one can achieve efficient generation of moderately high multicolor harmonics via multiphoton resonant excitation by appropriate laser pulses.

We investigate polyatomic ultralong-range Rydberg molecules consisting of three ground-state atoms bound to a Rydberg atom via $s$- and $p$-wave interactions. By employing the finite basis set representation of the unperturbed Rydberg electron Green's function we reduce the computational effort to solve the electronic problem substantially. This method is subsequently applied to determine the potential energy surfaces of triatomic systems in electronic $s$- and $p$-Rydberg states. Their molecular geometry and resulting vibrational structure are analyzed within an adiabatic approach that separates the vibrational bending and stretching dynamics. This procedure yields information on the radial and angular arrangement of the nuclei and indicates in particular that kinetic couplings between bending and stretching modes induce a linear structure in triatomic $l=0$ ultralong-range Rydberg molecules.

A Kohn-Sham time-dependent local-density-functional scheme is utilized to predict attosecond time delays of xenon $4d$ photoionization that involves the $4d$ giant dipole resonance and Cooper minimum. The fundamental effect of electron correlations to uniquely determine the delay at both regions is demonstrated. In particular, for the giant dipole resonance, the delay underpins strong collective effect, emulating the recent prediction at ${\mathrm{C}}_{60}$ giant plasmon resonance [T. Barillot et al., Phys. Rev. A 91, 033413 (2015)]. For the Cooper minimum, a qualitative similarity with a photorecombination experiment near argon $3p$ minimum [S. B. Schoun et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 112, 153001 (2014)] is found. The result should encourage attosecond measurements of Xe $4d$ photoemission.

We study the transport, decoherence, and the dissipation of the kinetic energy of a mobile impurity interacting with a bath of free fermions in a one-dimensional lattice. Numerical simulations are made with the time-evolving block decimation method, starting from a state where the impurity and bath are decoupled. We introduce a mass imbalance between the impurity and bath particles and find that the fastest decoherence occurs for a light impurity in a bath of heavy particles. By contrast, the fastest dissipation of energy occurs when the masses are equal. We present a simple model for decoherence in the heavy bath limit, and a linear density response description of the interaction which predicts maximum dissipation for equal masses.

We propose a method to break the chiral symmetry of light in traveling wave resonators by coupling the optical modes to a lossy channel. Through the engineered dissipation, an indirect dissipative coupling between two oppositely propagating modes can be realized. Combined with reactive coupling, it can break the chiral symmetry of the resonator, allowing light propagating only in one direction. The chiral symmetry breaking is numerically verified by the simulation of an electromagnetic field in a microring cavity, with proper refractive index distributions. This work provokes us to emphasize the dissipation engineering in photonics, and that the generalized idea can also be applied to other systems.

Recent work has unveiled a new class of optical systems that can exhibit the characteristic features of superfluidity. One such system relies on the repulsive photon-photon interaction that is mediated by a thermal optical nonlinearity and is therefore inherently nonlocal due to thermal diffusion. Here we investigate how such a nonlocal interaction, which at a first inspection would not be expected to lead to superfluid behavior, may be tailored by acting upon the geometry of the photon fluid itself. Our models and measurements show that restricting the laser profile and hence the photon fluid to a strongly elliptical geometry modifies thermal diffusion along the major beam axis and reduces the effective nonlocal interaction length by two orders of magnitude. This in turn enables the system to display a characteristic trait of superfluid flow: the nucleation of quantized vortices in the flow past an extended physical obstacle. These results are general and apply to other nonlocal fluids, such as dipolar Bose-Einstein condensates, and show that “thermal” photon superfluids provide an exciting and novel experimental environment for probing the nature of superfluidity, with applications to the study of quantum turbulence and analog gravity.

Quantum nonclassicality is the basic building stone for the vast majority of quantum information applications and methods of its generation are at the forefront of research. One of the obstacles any method needs to clear is the looming presence of decoherence and noise which act against the nonclassicality and often erase it completely. In this paper we show that nonclassical states of a quantum harmonic oscillator initially in thermal equilibrium states can be deterministically created by coupling it to a single two-level system. This can be achieved even in the absorption regime in which the two-level system is initially in the ground state. The method is resilient to noise and it may actually benefit from it, as witnessed by the systems with higher thermal energy producing more nonclassical states.