The fully symmetric Gaussian tripartite entangled pure states will not exhibit two-mode Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) steering. This means that any two participants cannot share quantum secrets using the security of one-sided device independent quantum key distribution (1SDI-QKD) without involving the third. They are restricted at most to standard quantum key distribution, which is less secure. Here we demonstrate an asymmetric tripartite system that can exhibit bipartite EPR steering, so that two of the participants can use 1SDI-QKD without involving the other. This is possible because the promiscuity relations of continuous-variable tripartite entanglement are different from those of discrete-variable systems. We analyze these properties for two different systems, showing that the asymmetric system exhibits practical properties not found in the symmetric one.

Nonlinear operations are essential for quantum information processing. We propose a way of implementing a class of nonlinear operations by sequential application of conditional gates based on Jaynes-Cummings (JC) interaction and projective measurements. The scheme has many advantages over the previously proposed all-optical methods and can be applied in several available experimental platforms, such as cavity quantum electrodynamics, trapped ions, and others. We demonstrate performance of the approach on the example of the cubic nonlinearity. We show several different ways in which the full nonlinear operation can be decomposed into sequences of the individual gates, and we compare their performance.

Quantum communication without a shared reference frame or the construction of a relational quantum theory requires the notion of a quantum reference frame. We analyze aspects of quantum reference frames associated with noncompact groups, specifically, the group of spatial translations and Galilean boosts. We begin by demonstrating how the usually employed group average, used to dispense of the notion of an external reference frame, leads to unphysical states when applied to reference frames associated with noncompact groups. However, we show that this average does lead naturally to a reduced state on the relative degrees of freedom of a system, which was previously considered by Angelo et al. [J. Phys. A: Math. Theor. 44, 145304 (2011)]. We then study in detail the informational properties of this reduced state for systems of two and three particles in Gaussian states.

Using resonant light absorption, random-walk motions of rubidium atoms in nitrogen buffer gas are observed directly. The transmitted light intensity through atomic vapor is measured, and its spectrum is obtained, down to orders of magnitude below the shot-noise level to detect fluctuations caused by atomic motions. To understand the measured spectra, the spectrum for atoms performing random walks in a Gaussian light beam is computed, and its analytical form is obtained. The spectrum has $1/f^2$ ($f$ is frequency) behavior at higher frequencies, crossing over to a different, but well-defined, behavior at lower frequencies. The properties of this theoretical spectrum agree excellently with the measured spectrum. This understanding also enables us to obtain the diffusion constant, the photon cross section of atoms in buffer gas, and the atomic number density from a single spectral measurement. We further discuss other possible applications of our experimental method and analysis.

We theoretically study how time- and angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy can be applied for imaging coherent electron dynamics in molecules. We consider a process in which a pump pulse triggers coherent electronic dynamics in a molecule by creating a valence electron hole. An ultrashort extreme ultraviolet probe pulse creates a second electron hole in the molecule. Information about the electron dynamics is accessed by analyzing angular distributions of photoemission probabilities at a fixed photoelectron energy. We demonstrate that a rigorous theoretical analysis, which takes into account the indistinguishability of transitions induced by the ultrashort, broadband probe pulse and electron hole correlation effects, is necessary for the interpretation of time- and angle-resolved photoelectron spectra. We show how a Fourier analysis of time- and angle-resolved photoelectron spectra from a molecule can be applied to follow its electron dynamics by considering photoelectron distributions from an indole molecular cation with coherent electron dynamics.

In a combined experimental and theoretical study we have investigated the ionization of atomic argon upon irradiation with intense soft-x-ray pulses of 105 eV photon energy from the free-electron laser FLASH. The measured ion yields show charge states up to ${\mathrm{Ar}}^{7+}$. The comparison with the theoretical study of the underlying photoionization dynamics highlights the importance of excited states in general and of processes governed by electron correlation in particular, namely, ionization with excitation and shake-off, processes usually inaccessible by measurements of ionic yields only. The ${\mathrm{Ar}}^{7+}$ yield shows a clear deviation from the predictions of the commonly used model of sequential ionization via single-electron processes and the observed signal can only be explained by taking into account the full multiplet structure of the involved configurations and by inclusion of two-electron processes. The competing process of two-photon ionization from the ground state of ${\mathrm{Ar}}^{6+}$ is calculated to be orders of magnitude smaller.

Interacting Fermi systems in the strongly correlated regime play a fundamental role in many areas of physics and are of particular interest to the condensed matter community. Though weakly interacting fermions are understood, strongly correlated fermions are difficult to describe theoretically as there is no small interaction parameter to expand about. Existing strong-coupling theories rely heavily on the so-called many-body $T$-matrix approximation that sums ladder-type Feynman diagrams. Here, by acknowledging the fact that the effective interparticle interaction (i.e., the vertex function) becomes smaller above three dimensions, we propose an alternative way to reorganize Feynman diagrams and develop a theoretical framework for interacting Fermi gases beyond the ladder approximation. As an application, we solve the equation of state for three- and two-dimensional strongly interacting fermions and find excellent agreement with experimental [M. J. H. Ku et al., Science 335, 563 (2012)] and other theoretical results above temperatures of $0.5T_F$.

We examine the performance of a nonlinear fiber gyroscope for improved signal detection beating the quantum limits of its linear counterparts. The performance is examined when the nonlinear gyroscope is illuminated by practical field states, such as coherent and quadrature squeezed states. This is compared with the case of more ideal probes such as photon-number states.

I calculate the mixed three-tangle ${\tau }_3\left[\rho \right]$ for the reduced density matrices of the four-qubit representant states found in Phys. Rev. A 65, 052112 (2002). In most of the cases, the convex roof is obtained, except for one class, where I provide with an upper bound, which is assumed to be very close to the convex roof. I compare with results published in Phys. Rev. Lett. 113, 110501 (2014). Since the method applied there usually results in higher values for the upper bound, in certain cases it can be understood that the convex roof is obtained exactly, namely, when the zero-polytope where ${\tau }_3$ vanishes shrinks to a single point.

The sensitivity of classical and quantum sensing is impaired in a noisy environment. Thus, one of the main challenges facing sensing protocols is to reduce the noise while preserving the signal. State-of-the-art quantum sensing protocols that rely on dynamical decoupling achieve this goal under the restriction of long noise correlation times. We implement a proof-of-principle experiment of a protocol to recover sensitivity by using an error correction for photonic systems that does not have this restriction. The protocol uses a protected entangled qubit to correct a single error. Our results show a recovery of about $87\%$ of the sensitivity, independent of the noise probability.

We identify and study a security loophole in continuous-variable quantum key distribution (CVQKD) implementations, related to the imperfect linearity of the homodyne detector. By exploiting this loophole, we propose an active side-channel attack on the Gaussian-modulated coherent-state CVQKD protocol combining an intercept-resend attack with an induced saturation of the homodyne detection on the receiver side (Bob). We show that an attacker can bias the excess noise estimation by displacing the quadratures of the coherent states received by Bob. We propose a saturation model that matches experimental measurements on the homodyne detection and use this model to study the impact of the saturation attack on parameter estimation in CVQKD. We demonstrate that this attack can bias the excess noise estimation beyond the null key threshold for any system parameter, thus leading to a full security break. If we consider an additional criterion imposing that the channel transmission estimation should not be affected by the attack, then the saturation attack can only be launched if the attenuation on the quantum channel is sufficient, corresponding to attenuations larger than approximately 6 dB. We moreover discuss the possible countermeasures against the saturation attack and propose a countermeasure based on Gaussian postselection that can be implemented by classical postprocessing and may allow one to distill the secret key when the raw measurement data are partly saturated.

We define the non–coherence-generating channel as the completely positive trace-preserving map which does not generate quantum coherence from an incoherent state. The incoherent operations are the strict subset of the non–coherence-generating channels. Although the relative entropy of coherence is monotonically decreasing under the non–coherence-generating channels, we prove that the coherence of formation may increase under such channels. Interestingly, by building a mathematical relation between the coherence of formation and the entanglement of formation, we show that the coherence of formation of a single-qubit state is never increased by a non–coherence-generating channel. This leads to the superadditivity property for the coherence increasing power of quantum channels, namely, while two channels cannot increase coherence individually, they may increase the quantum coherence of a composed system. Further, we derive the general form of the rank-2 non–coherence-generating qubit channels. Our results contribute to the resource theory of quantum coherence.

We study the propagation of different types of correlations through a quantum bus formed by a chain of coupled harmonic oscillators. This includes steering, entanglement, mutual information, quantum discord, and Bell-like nonlocality. The whole system consists of the quantum bus (propagation medium) and other quantum harmonic oscillators (sources and receivers of quantum correlations) weakly coupled to the chain. We are particularly interested in using the point of view of transport to spot distinctive features displayed by different kinds of correlations. We found, for instance, that there are fundamental differences in the way steering and discord propagate, depending on the way they are defined with respect to the parties involved in the initial correlated state. We analyzed both the closed- and open-system dynamics as well as the role played by thermal excitations in the propagation of the correlations.

We propose a technique to fully characterize the temporal structure of extreme ultraviolet pulses by ionizing a bound coherent electronic wave packet. The influence of the dipole phase, which is the main obstacle for state-of-the-art pulse characterization schemes, can be eliminated by angle integration of the photoelectron spectrum. We show that in particular, atomic Rydberg wave packets are ideal and that wave packets involving multiple electronic states provide redundant information that can be used to cross-check the consistency of the phase reconstruction.

We investigate propagating dark soliton solutions of the two-dimensional defocusing nonlinear Schrödinger or Gross-Pitaevskii (NLS-GP) equation that are transversely confined to propagate in an infinitely long channel. Families of single, vortex, and multilobed solitons are computed using a spectrally accurate numerical scheme. The multilobed solitons are unstable to small transverse perturbations. However, the single-lobed solitons are stable if they are sufficiently confined along the transverse direction, which explains their effective one-dimensional dynamics. The emergence of a transverse modulational instability is characterized in terms of a spectral bifurcation. The critical confinement width for this bifurcation is found to coincide with the existence of a propagating vortex solution and the onset of a “snaking” instability in the dark soliton dynamics that, in turn, give rise to vortex or multivortex excitations. These results shed light on the superfluidic hydrodynamics of dispersive shock waves in Bose-Einstein condensates and nonlinear optics.

Conventional caustic methods in real or Fourier space produced accelerating optical beams only with convex trajectories. We developed a superposition caustic method capable of winding light beams along nonconvex trajectories. We ascertain this method by constructing a one-dimensional (1D) accelerating beam moving along a sinusoidal trajectory, and subsequently extending to two-dimensional (2D) accelerating beams along arbitrarily elliptical helical trajectories. We experimentally implemented the method with a compact and robust integrated optics approach by fabricating micro-optical structures on quartz glass plates to perform the spatial phase and amplitude modulation to the incident light, generating beam trajectories highly consistent with prediction. The theoretical and implementation methods can in principle be extended to the construction of accelerating beams with a wide variety of nonconvex trajectories, thereby opening up a route of manipulating light beams for fundamental research and practical applications.

We propose a mechanism for testing the theory of collapse models such as continuous spontaneous localization (CSL) by examining the parametric heating rate of a trapped nanosphere. The random localizations of the center of mass for a given particle predicted by the CSL model can be understood as a stochastic force embodying a source of heating for the nanosphere. We show that by utilizing a Paul trap to levitate the particle and optical cooling, it is possible to reduce environmental decoherence to such a level that CSL dominates the dynamics and contributes the main source of heating. We show that this approach allows measurements to be made on the time scale of seconds and that the free parameter ${\lambda }_{\mathrm{csl}}$ which characterizes the model ought to be testable to values as low as ${10}^{-12}$ Hz.

We investigate the nonequilibrium dynamics of a driven-dissipative spin ensemble with competing power-law interactions. We demonstrate that dynamical phase transitions as well as bistabilities can emerge for asymptotic van der Waals interactions, but critically rely on the presence of a slower decaying potential core. Upon introducing random particle motion, we show that a finite gas temperature can drive a phase transition with regards to the spin degree of freedom and eventually leads to mean-field behavior in the high-temperature limit. Our work reconciles contrasting observations of recent experiments with Rydberg atoms in the cold-gas and hot-vapor domain, and introduces an efficient theoretical framework in the latter regime.