The collective nature of light emission by atomic ensembles yields fascinating effects such as superradiance and radiation trapping even at the single-photon level. Light emission is influenced by virtual transitions and the collective Lamb shift which yields peculiar features in temporal evolution of the atomic system. We study how two-dimensional atomic structures collectively emit a single photon. Namely, we consider spherical, cylindrical, and spheroidal shells with two-level atoms continuously distributed on the shell surface and find exact analytical solutions for eigenstates of such systems and their collective decay rates and frequency shifts. We identify states which undergo superradiant decay and states which are trapped and investigate how size and shape of the shell affects collective light emission. Our findings could be useful for quantum information storage and the design of optical switches.

We study the behavior of ultracold bosonic gases in the critical region above the Bose-Einstein condensation in the presence of an artificial magnetic field, $B_{\mathrm{art}}$. We show that the condensate fluctuations above the critical temperature $T_{\mathrm{c}}$ cause the fluctuational susceptibility, ${\chi }_{\mathrm{fl}}$, of a uniform gas to have a stronger power-law divergence than in an analogous superconducting system. Measuring such a divergence opens new ways of exploring critical properties of ultracold gases and an opportunity for an accurate determination of $T_{\mathrm{c}}$. We describe a method of measuring ${\chi }_{\mathrm{fl}}$ which requires a constant gradient in $B_{\mathrm{art}}$ and suggest a way of creating such a field in experiment.

The time dynamics of quantum correlations in the quantum transverse anisotropic $XY$ spin chain of infinite length is studied at zero and finite temperatures. The evolution occurs due to the instantaneous quenching of the coupling constant between the nearest-neighbor spins of the model, which is performed either within the same phase or across the quantum phase-transition point connecting the order-disorder phases of the model. We characterize the time-evolved quantum correlations, viz., entanglement and quantum discord, which exhibit varying behavior depending on the initial state and the quenching scheme. We show that the system is endowed with enhanced nearest-neighbor bipartite quantum correlations compared to that of the initial state, when quenched from the ordered to the deep disordered phase. However, nearest-neighbor quantum correlations are almost washed out when the system is quenched from the disordered to the ordered phase with the initial state being at the zero temperature. We also identify the condition for the occurrence of enhanced bipartite correlations when the system is quenched within the same phase. Moreover, we investigate the bipartite quantum correlations when the initial state is a thermal equilibrium state with finite temperature, which reveals the effects of thermal fluctuation on the phenomena observed at zero temperature. Finally, an analogous analysis is carried out for zero-temperature next-nearest-neighbor quantum correlations.

Quantum walks with memory (QWM) are a type of modified quantum walks that record the walker's latest path. As we know, only two kinds of QWM have been presented up to now. It is desired to design more QWM for research, so that we can explore the potential of QWM. In this work, by presenting the one-to-one correspondence between QWM on a regular graph and quantum walks without memory (QWoM) on a line digraph of the regular graph, we construct a generic model of QWM on regular graphs. This construction gives a general scheme for building all possible standard QWM on regular graphs and makes it possible to study properties of different kinds of QWM. Here, by taking the simplest example, which is QWM with one memory on the line, we analyze some properties of QWM, such as variance, occupancy rate, and localization.

Recent technological advances in integrated photonics have spurred on the study of topological phenomena in engineered bosonic systems. Indeed, the controllability of silicon ring-resonator arrays has opened up new perspectives for building lattices for photons with topologically nontrivial bands and integrating them into photonic devices for practical applications. Here, we push these developments even further by exploiting the different modes of a silicon ring resonator as an extra dimension for photons. Tunneling along this synthetic dimension is implemented via an external time-dependent modulation that allows for the generation of engineered gauge fields. We show how this approach can be used to generate a variety of exciting topological phenomena in integrated photonics, ranging from a topologically-robust optical isolator in a spatially one-dimensional (1D) ring-resonator chain to a driven-dissipative analog of the 4D quantum Hall effect in a spatially 3D resonator lattice. Our proposal paves the way towards the use of topological effects in the design of novel photonic lattices supporting many frequency channels and displaying higher connectivities.

We investigate spontaneous emission of a two-level atom with an arbitrarily polarized electric dipole in front of a flat dielectric surface. We treat the general case where the atomic dipole matrix element is a complex vector, that is, the atomic dipole can rotate with time in space. We calculate the rates of spontaneous emission into evanescent and radiation modes. We systematically study the angular densities of the rates in the space of wave vectors for the field modes. We show that the asymmetry of the angular density of the spontaneous emission rate under central inversion in the space of in-plane wave vectors occurs when the ellipticity vector of the atomic dipole polarization overlaps with the ellipticity vector of the field mode polarization.

The interplay between an open quantum system and its environment can lead to both coherent and incoherent behavior. We explore the extent to which strong coupling to a single bosonic mode can alter the coherence properties of a two-level system in a structured environment. This mode is treated exactly, with the rest of the environment comprising a Markovian bath of bosonic modes. The strength of the coupling between the two-level system and the single mode is varied for a variety of forms for the bath spectral density in order to assess whether the coherent dynamics of the two-level system are modified. We find a clear renormalization of the site population oscillation frequency that causes an altered interaction with the bath. This leads to enhanced or reduced coherent behavior of the two-level system, depending on the form of the spectral density function. We present an intuitive interpretation, based on an analytical model, to explain the behavior.

Although the Aharonov-Bohm and related effects are familiar in solid-state and high-energy physics, the nonlocality of these effects has been questioned. Here we show that the Aharonov-Bohm effect has two very different aspects. One aspect is instantaneous and nonlocal; the other aspect, which depends on entanglement, unfolds continuously over time. While local, gauge-invariant variables may occasionally suffice for explaining the continuous aspect, we argue that they cannot explain the instantaneous aspect. Thus the Aharonov-Bohm effect is, in general, nonlocal.

Can robustness against experimental imperfections and noise be embedded into a quantum simulation? In this paper, we report on a special case in which this is possible. A spin chain can be engineered such that, in the absence of imperfections and noise, an unknown quantum state is transported from one end of the chain to the other, due only to the intrinsic dynamics of the system. We show that an encoding into a standard error-correcting code (a Calderbank-Shor-Steane code) can be embedded into this simulation task such that a modified error-correction procedure on readout can recover from sufficiently low rates of noise during transport.

We theoretically investigate and experimentally demonstrate a procedure for conditional control and enhancement of an interferometric coupling between two qubits encoded into states of bosonic particles. Our procedure combines local coupling of one of the particles to an auxiliary mode and single-qubit quantum filtering. We experimentally verify the proposed procedure using a linear optical setup where qubits are encoded into quantum states of single photons and coupled at a beam splitter with a fixed transmittance. With our protocol, we implement a range of different effective transmittances, demonstrate both enhancement and reduction of the coupling strength, and observe dependence of two-photon bunching on the effective transmittance. To make our analysis complete, we also theoretically investigate a more general scheme where each particle is coupled to a separate auxiliary mode and show that this latter scheme enables us to achieve higher implementation probability. We show that our approach can be extended also to other kinds of qubit-qubit interactions.

Ionization of a helium atom by intense extreme ultraviolet laser pulses is investigated in a frequency regime where the high-frequency stabilization condition is only fulfilled for the lowest single ionization channel. Multiphoton double ionization substantially contributes to the total ionization probability for superintense fields. As a result, no obvious stabilization against total ionization occurs. A detailed view of probabilities into different single ionization channels as a function of the field strength is presented. We find that the probabilities into some ionic channels peak at field strengths corresponding to one-photon resonances between field-dressed ionic states in the high-frequency Floquet theory. Thus we propose a sequential “ionization-excitation” mechanism in the dressed energy picture: first, one-photon absorption causes single ionization, leaving the ion in its dressed ground state; second, the ion is excited to a new state via one-photon absorption at the field strength where the resonance condition in the dressed ionic system is fulfilled. To reveal the sequential mechanism in the time domain, we also take a time-dependent view on the channel-resolved probabilities, observing the decrease of the ground-state ionic channel probability during the laser pulse when the field strength is such that a resonance condition exists between the dressed states in the ion.

We present temporal intensity correlation measurements of light scattered by a hot atomic vapor. Clear evidence of photon bunching is shown at very short time scales (nanoseconds) imposed by the Doppler broadening of the hot vapor. Moreover, we demonstrate that relevant information about the scattering process, such as the ratio of single to multiple scattering, can be deduced from the measured intensity correlation function. These measurements justify the interest in temporal intensity correlation to access nontrivial spectral features, with potential applications in astrophysics.

The superfluid to Mott insulator transition and the superradiant transition are textbook examples of quantum phase transition and coherent quantum optics, respectively. Recent experiments in ETH and Hamburg have succeeded in loading degenerate bosonic atomic gases in optical lattices inside a cavity, which enables the first experimental study of the interplay between these two transitions. In this Rapid Communication we present the theoretical phase diagram for the ETH Zurich experimental setup, and determine the phase boundaries and the orders of the phase transitions between the normal superfluid phase, the superfluid with superradiant light, the normal Mott insulator, and the Mott insulator with superradiant light. We find that in contrast to the second-order superradiant transition in a weakly interacting Bose condensate, strong correlations in the superfluid nearby a Mott transition can render the superradiant transition to a first-order one. Our results will stimulate further experimental studies of interactions between cavity light and strongly interacting quantum matter.

The Born-Oppenheimer electronic wave function ${\mathrm{\Phi }}_R^{\text{BO}}\left(r\right)$ picks up a topological phase factor $\pm 1$, a special case of Berry phase, when it is transported around a conical intersection of two adiabatic potential energy surfaces in $R$ space. We show that this topological quantity reverts to a geometric quantity $e^{i\gamma }$ if the geometric phase $\gamma =\oint \mathrm{Im}\langle {\mathrm{\Phi }}_R|{\mathbf{\nabla }}_{\mu }{\mathrm{\Phi }}_R\rangle ·d{\mathbf{R}}_{\mu }$ is evaluated with the conditional electronic wave function ${\mathrm{\Phi }}_R\left(r\right)$ from the exact electron-nuclear factorization ${\mathrm{\Phi }}_R\left(r\right)\chi \left(R\right)$ instead of the adiabatic function ${\mathrm{\Phi }}_R^{\text{BO}}\left(r\right)$. A model of a pseudorotating triatomic molecule, also applicable to dynamical Jahn-Teller ions in bulk crystals, provides examples of nontrivial induced vector potentials and molecular geometric phase from the exact factorization. The induced vector potential gives a contribution to the circulating nuclear current that cannot be removed by a gauge transformation. The exact potential energy surface is calculated and found to contain a term depending on the Fubini-Study metric for the conditional electronic wave function.

The interplay of the relativistic and correlation effects in the permanent electric dipole moments of the $X{}^2{\mathrm{\Sigma }}^{+}$ electronic ground states of the alkaline-earth-metal monofluorides (BeF, MgF, CaF, SrF, and BaF) has been studied using a relativistic coupled cluster method. The calculations were carried out using double, triple, and quadruple zeta basis sets, and with no core orbitals frozen. The results are compared with those of other calculations available in the literature and with experiments. The correlation trends in the permanent electric dipole moments of these molecules are discussed in detail. This information will be useful in throwing light on the interplay between relativistic and correlation effects of other properties that are relevant to fundamental physics.

We present a time-parallelization method that enables one to accelerate the computation of quantum optimal control algorithms. We show that this approach is approximately fully efficient when based on a gradient method as optimization solver: the computational time is approximately divided by the number of available processors. The control of spin systems, molecular orientation, and Bose-Einstein condensates are used as illustrative examples to highlight the wide range of applications of this numerical scheme.