We present a simplified version of a repeater protocol in a cold neutral-atom ensemble with Rydberg excitations optimized for two-node entanglement generation and describe a protocol for quantum teleportation. Our proposal draws from previous proposals [B. Zhao et al., Phys. Rev. A 81, 052329 (2010); Y. Han et al., Phys. Rev. A 81, 052311 (2010)] that described efficient and robust protocols for long-distance entanglement with many nodes. Using realistic experimental values, we predict an entanglement generation rate of $\sim 25\mathrm{Hz}$ and a teleportation rate of $\sim 5\mathrm{Hz}$. Our predicted rates match the current state-of-the-art experiments for entanglement generation and teleportation between quantum memories. With improved efficiencies we predict entanglement generation and teleportation rates of $\sim 7.8$ and $\sim 3.6$ kHz, respectively, representing a two-order-of-magnitude improvement over the currently realized values. Cold-atom ensembles with Rydberg excitations are promising candidates for repeater nodes because collective effects in the ensemble can be used to deterministically generate a long-lived ground-state memory which may be efficiently mapped onto a directionally emitted single photon.

Given its importance to many other areas of physics, from condensed-matter physics to thermodynamics, time-reversal symmetry has had relatively little influence on quantum information science. Here we develop a network-based picture of time-reversal theory, classifying Hamiltonians and quantum circuits as time symmetric or not in terms of the elements and geometries of their underlying networks. Many of the typical circuits of quantum information science are found to exhibit time asymmetry. Moreover, we show that time asymmetry in circuits can be controlled using local gates only and can simulate time asymmetry in Hamiltonian evolution. We experimentally implement a fundamental example in which controlled time-reversal asymmetry in a palindromic quantum circuit leads to near-perfect transport. Our results pave the way for using time-symmetry breaking to control coherent transport and imply that time asymmetry represents an omnipresent yet poorly understood effect in quantum information science.

In the context of measurement-based quantum computation a way of maintaining the coherence of a graph state is to measure its stabilizer operators. Aside from performing quantum error correction, it is possible to exploit the information gained from these measurements to characterize and then counteract a coherent source of errors; that is, to determine all the parameters of an error channel that applies a fixed—but unknown—unitary operation to the physical qubits. Such a channel is generated, e.g., by local stray fields that act on the qubits. We study the case in which each qubit of a given graph state may see a different error channel and we focus on channels given by a rotation on the Bloch sphere around either the $\widehat{\mathit{x}}$, the $\widehat{\mathit{y}}$, or the $\widehat{\mathit{z}}$ axis, for which analytical results can be given in a compact form. The possibility of reconstructing the channels at all qubits depends nontrivially on the topology of the graph state. We prove via perturbation methods that the reconstruction process is robust and supplement the analytic results with numerical evidence.

Alkaline-earth-metal atoms have a long-lived electronic excited state, and when atoms in this excited state are localized in the Fermi sea of ground-state atoms by an external potential, they serve as magnetic impurities, due to the spin-exchange interaction between the excited- and the ground-state atoms. This can give rise to the Kondo effect. However, in order to achieve this effect in current atomic gas experiments, it requires the Kondo temperature to be increased to a sizable portion of the Fermi temperature. In this paper we calculate the confinement-induced resonance (CIR) for the spin-exchanging interaction between the ground and the excited states of the alkaline-earth-metal atoms and propose that the spin-exchange interaction can be strongly enhanced by utilizing the CIR. We analyze this system by the renormalization-group approach and show that near a CIR, the Kondo temperature can be significantly enhanced.

We examine electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) in an ensemble of cold $\mathrm{\Lambda }$-type atoms induced by a quantum control field in multimode coherent states and compare it with the transparency created by the classical light of the same intensity. We show that the perfect coincidence is achieved only in the case of a single-mode coherent state, whereas the transparency sharply decreases, when the number of the modes exceeds the mean number of control photons in the medium. The origin of the effect is the modification of photon statistics in the control field with increasing the number of the modes that weakens its interaction with atoms resulting in a strong probe absorption. For the same reason, the probe pulse transforms from EIT-based slow light into superluminal propagation caused by the absorption.

Using the theoretical description beyond the dipole approximation, we examine the impact of the electron magnetic drift caused by a strong midinfrared laser field on the feasibility and ultimate limitations of the method proposed recently [C. Hernández-García et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 111, 033002 (2013)] as a route to the generation of zeptosecond x-ray waveforms; this method relies on the interference of high-harmonic emission from multiple reencounters of the electron wave packet with the ion. We show that the electron magnetic drift serves as the spectral filter changing the relative weights of the contributions to the high-harmonic signal from different rescattering events. For a range of driving wavelengths in the midinfrared, the use of the control of the carrier-envelope phase, occasionally in combination with the spectral filtering, to cope with the magnetic drift effect is shown to facilitate the production of intense high-contrast keV beats of durations shorter than 0.8 attosecond. The limitations on the laser wavelengths usable for implementing this approach are determined by the growing unamendable imbalance between the contributions of interfering paths and by an overall decline in the efficiency of high-harmonic generation at longer driving wavelengths.

We derive a quantum master equation which describes the dynamics of the ensemble-averaged state of homogeneous disorder models at short times, and mediates a transition from coherent superpositions into classical mixtures. While each single realization follows unitary dynamics, this decoherencelike behavior arises as a consequence of the ensemble average. The master equation manifestly reflects the translational invariance of the disorder correlations and allows us to relate the disorder-induced dynamics to a collisional decoherence process, where the disorder correlations determine the spatial decay of coherences. We apply our theory to the (one-dimensional) Anderson model.

We examine the problem of finding the minimum number of Pauli measurements needed to uniquely determine an arbitrary $n$-qubit pure state among all quantum states. We show that only 11 Pauli measurements are needed to determine an arbitrary two-qubit pure state compared to the full quantum state tomography with 16 measurements, and only 31 Pauli measurements are needed to determine an arbitrary three-qubit pure state compared to the full quantum state tomography with 64 measurements. We demonstrate that our protocol is robust under depolarizing error with simulated random pure states. We experimentally test the protocol on two- and three-qubit systems with nuclear magnetic resonance techniques. We show that the pure-state tomography protocol saves us a number of measurements without considerable loss of fidelity. We compare our protocol with same-size sets of randomly selected Pauli operators and find that our selected set of Pauli measurements significantly outperforms those random sampling sets. As a direct application, our scheme can also be used to reduce the number of settings needed for pure-state tomography in quantum optical systems.

Experimental angle-resolved photoelectron-photoion coincidence experiments measure photoelectron angular distributions (PADs) in dissociative photoionization (DPI) in the reference frame provided by the momenta of the emitted heavy fragments. By extension of the nomenclature used with DPI of diatomic molecules, we refer to such a PAD as a recoil-frame PAD (RFPAD). When the dissociation is fast compared to molecular rotational and bending motions, the emission directions of the heavy fragments can be used to determine the orientation of the bonds that are broken in the DPI at the time of the ionization, which is known as the axial-recoil approximation (ARA). When the ARA is valid, the RFPADs correspond to molecular-frame photoelectron angular distributions (MFPADs) when the momenta of a sufficient number of the heavy fragments are determined. When only two fragments are formed, the experiment cannot measure the orientation of the fragments about the recoil axes so that the resulting measured PAD is an azimuthally averaged RFPAD (AA-RFPAD). In this study we consider how the breakdown of the ARA due to rotation will modify the observed RFPADs for DPI processes in nonlinear molecules for ionization by light of arbitrary polarization. This model is applied to the core C $1s$ DPI of ${\mathrm{CH}}_4$, with the results compared to experimental measurements and previous theoretical calculations done within the ARA. The published results indicate that there is a breakdown in the ARA for two-fragment events where the heavy-fragment kinetic energy release was less than 9 eV. Including the breakdown of the ARA due to rotation in our calculations gives very good agreement with the experimental AA-RFPAD, leading to an estimate of upper bounds on the predissociative lifetimes as a function of the kinetic energy release of the intermediate ion states formed in the DPI process.

We explore the dynamics of a resonant Bose gas following its quench to a strongly interacting regime near a Feshbach resonance. For such deep quenches, we utilize a self-consistent dynamic field approximation and find that after an initial regime of many-body Rabi-type oscillations between the condensate and finite-momentum quasiparticle pairs, at long times, the gas reaches a prethermalized nonequilibrium steady state. We explore the resulting state through its broad stationary momentum distribution function, that exhibits a power-law high-momentum tail. We study the dynamics and steady-state form of the associated enhanced depletion, quench-rate-dependent excitation energy, Tan's contact, structure function, and radio-frequency spectroscopy. We find these predictions to be in a qualitative agreement with recent experiments.

We investigate how the multiple bands of fermions on a crystal lattice evolve if a magnetic field is added which does not increase the number of bands. The kagome lattice is studied as generic example for a lattice with loops of three bonds. Finite Chern numbers occur as a nontrivial topological property in the presence of the magnetic field. The symmetries and periodicities as a function of the applied field are discussed. Strikingly, the dispersions of the edge states depend crucially on the precise shape of the boundary. This suggests that suitable design of the boundaries helps to tune physical properties which may even differ between upper and lower edges. Moreover, we suggest a promising gauge to realize this model in optical lattices.

When considering the effect of quantum noise (QN) in a phase-insensitive linear amplifier or attenuator, it is customary to use the single-channel Caves model (SC-CM). Although this model is valid in simple situations, such as the presence of a beam splitter, it is not necessarily valid when a system with many degrees of freedom is involved. In order to address this issue, we consider in this paper various atomic transitions corresponding to amplification or attenuation using the master-equation- (ME-) based approach to model the QN and to compare the results with the SC-CM. For a four-level system that consists of a transition producing a broad gain peak and a transition producing an absorption dip, which results in perfect transparency at the center, we observe a catastrophic breakdown of the SC-CM. We also show that for a general two-level atomic system, the SC-CM does not apply, except in the limiting case when only either amplification or attenuation exists. A special case where the two models predict the same result is a Λ-type three-level electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) system in which the QN at zero detuning vanishes while the system is in the dark state. We also study an optically pumped five-level gain EIT system which has a perfect transparency dip superimposed on a gain profile and yields the negative dispersion suitable for use in enhancing the sensitivity-bandwidth product of an interferometric gravitational wave detector. In this case, we find that, for some set of parameters, the QN is vanishingly small at the center of the dip, and the SC-CM agrees closely with the ME model. However, we also find that for some other set of parameters, the SC-SM model disagrees strongly with the ME model. All these cases illustrate a wide range of variations in the degree of disagreement between the predictions of the SC-CM and the ME approaches.

Quantum metrology exploits quantum correlations to make precise measurements with limited particle numbers. By utilizing inter- and intramode correlations in an optical interferometer, we find a state that combines entanglement and squeezing to give a sevenfold enhancement in the quantum Fisher information (QFI)—a metric related to the precision—over the shot-noise limit, for low photon numbers. Motivated by practicality we then look at the squeezed cat state, which has recently been made experimentally, and shows further precision gains over the shot-noise limit and a threefold improvement in the QFI over the optimal Gaussian state. We present a conceptually simple measurement scheme that saturates the QFI, and we demonstrate a robustness to loss for small photon numbers. The squeezed cat state can therefore give a significant precision enhancement in optical quantum metrology in practical and realistic conditions.

Bidirectional ground-satellite laser links suffer from turbulence-induced scintillation and phase distortion. We study the impact of turbulence on coherent detection and the related phase noise that restricts time and frequency transfer precision. We evaluate the capacity to obtain a two-way cancellation of atmospheric effects despite the asymmetry between up- and downlink that limits the link reciprocity. For ground-satellite links, the asymmetry is induced by point-ahead angle and possibly the use, for the ground terminal, of different transceiver diameters, in reception and emission. The quantitative analysis is obtained thanks to refined end-to-end simulations under realistic turbulence and wind conditions as well as satellite kinematics. These temporally resolved simulations allow characterizing the coherent detection in terms of time series of heterodyne efficiency and phase noise for different system parameters. We show that tip-tilt correction on ground is mandatory at reception for the downlink and as a pre-compensation of the uplink. Besides, thanks to the large tilt angular correlation, the correction is shown to be efficient on uplink despite the point-ahead angle. Very good two-way compensation of turbulent effects is obtained even with the asymmetries. The two-way differential phase noise is reduced to $1{\mathrm{rad}}^2$, with the best fractional frequency stability below $2\times {10}^{-17}$ after 1-s averaging time.

Bartkiewicz et al. [Phys. Rev. A 91, 012103 (2015)] provided an alternative analysis of an experiment performed by Danan et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 111, 240402 (2013)] which presented surprising evidence regarding the past of photons passing through an interferometer. They argued that the quantity used by Danan et al. is not a suitable which-path witness, and proposed an alternative. The weaknesses of the analysis are discussed, and it is argued that the alternative, analyzed properly, provides no new predictions.

In our recent paper [Phys. Rev. A 91, 012103 (2015)] we have provided an alternative description of a highly debated experiment by Danan et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 111, 240402 (2013)]. The former paper has been recently commented on by Vaidman [Phys. Rev. A 93, 036103 (2016)]. In this Reply we demonstrate that the comments are either invalid or, where valid, do not affect the results of our original paper.

The concept of coherence is one of cornerstones in physics. The development of quantum information science has lead to renewed interest in properly approaching the coherence at the quantum level. Various measures could be proposed to quantify coherence of a quantum state with respect to the prescribed orthonormal basis. To be a proper measure of coherence, each candidate should enjoy certain properties. It seems that the monotonicity property plays a crucial role here. Indeed, there is known an intuitive measure of coherence that does not share this condition. We study coherence measures induced by quantum divergences of the Tsallis type. Basic properties of the considered coherence quantifiers are derived. Tradeoff relations between coherence and mixedness are examined. The property of monotonicity under incoherent selective measurements has to be reformulated. The proposed formulation can naturally be treated as a parametric extension of its standard form. Finally, two coherence measures quadratic in moduli of matrix elements are compared from the monotonicity viewpoint.

A universal and optimal method for the polarimetry of light with arbitrary photon statistics is presented. The method is based on the continuous maximum-likelihood positive operator-valued measure (ML-POVM) for pure polarization states over the surface of the Bloch sphere. The success probability and the mean fidelity are used as the figures of merit to show its performance. The POVM is found to attain the collective bound of polarization estimation with respect to the mean fidelity. As demonstrations, explicit results for the $N$ photon Fock state, the phase-randomized coherent state (Poisson distribution), and the thermal light are obtained. It is found that the estimation performances for the Fock state and the Poisson distribution are almost identical, while that for the thermal light is much worse. This suggests that thermal light leaks less information to an eavesdropper and hence could potentially provide more security in polarization-encoded quantum communication protocols than a single-mode laser beam as customarily considered. Finally, comparisons against an optimal adaptive measurement with classical communications are made to show the better and more stable performance of the continuous ML-POVM.

We develop differential measurement protocols that circumvent the laser noise limit in the stability of optical clock comparisons by synchronous probing of two clocks using phase-locked local oscillators. This allows for probe times longer than the laser coherence time, avoids the Dick effect, and supports Heisenberg-limited measurement precision. We present protocols for such frequency comparisons and develop numerical simulations of the protocols with realistic noise sources. These methods provide a route to reduce frequency ratio measurement durations by more than an order of magnitude.