In a recent paper, Hagelstein and Pascalutsa [F. Hagelstein and V. Pascalutsa, Phys. Rev. A 91, 040502 (2015)] examine the error associated with an expansion of proton structure corrections to the Lamb shift in terms of moments of the charge distribution. They propose a small modification to a conventional parametrization of the proton's charge form factor and show that this can resolve the proton radius puzzle. However, while the size of the bump they add to the form factor is small, it is large compared to the total proton structure effects in the initial parametrization, yielding a final form factor that is unphysical. Reducing their modification to the point where the resulting form factor is physical does not allow for a resolution of the radius puzzle.

To comply with the critique of the preceding Comment [J. Arrington, Phys. Rev. A 93, 026501 (2016)], we consider another modification of the proton electric form factor, which resolves the proton-radius puzzle. The proposed modification satisfies all the consistency criteria put forward in the Comment and yet has an impact on the puzzle similar to that of the original paper [F. Hagelstein and V. Pascalutsa, Phys. Rev. A 91, 040502 (2015)]. We thus disagree with the concluding statement of the Comment: To the contrary, it is not difficult to find an ad hoc modification of the form factor at low $Q$ that resolves the discrepancy and is consistent with analyticity constraints. We emphasize once again that we do not consider such an ad hoc modification of the proton form factor to be a solution of the puzzle until a physical mechanism for it is found.

A continuous-variable measurement-device-independent multiparty quantum communication protocol is investigated in this paper. Utilizing the distributed continuous-variable Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger state, this protocol can implement both quantum cryptographic conference and quantum secret sharing. We analyze the security of the protocol against both the entangling cloner attack and the coherent attack. The entangling cloner attack is a practical individual attack, and the coherent attack is the optimal attack Eve can implement. Simulation results show that the coherent attack can greatly reduce the secret key rate. Different kinds of entangled attacks are compared and we finally discuss the optimal coherent attacks.

Quantum Merlin Arthur (QMA) is the class of problems which, though potentially hard to solve, have a quantum solution that can be verified efficiently using a quantum computer. It thus forms a natural quantum version of the classical complexity class NP (and its probabilistic variant MA, Merlin-Arthur games), where the verifier has only classical computational resources. In this paper, we study what happens when we restrict the quantum resources of the verifier to the bare minimum: individual measurements on single qubits received as they come, one by one. We find that despite this grave restriction, it is still possible to soundly verify any problem in QMA for the verifier with the minimum quantum resources possible, without using any quantum memory or multiqubit operations. We provide two independent proofs of this fact, based on measurement-based quantum computation and the local Hamiltonian problem. The former construction also applies to ${\mathrm{QMA}}_1$, i.e., QMA with one-sided error.

We present a combined experimental and theoretical study of the effects of Rydberg interactions on Autler-Townes spectra of ultracold gases of atomic strontium. Realizing two-photon Rydberg excitation via a long-lived triplet state allows us to probe the regime where Rydberg state decay presents the dominant decoherence mechanism. The effects of Rydberg interactions are observed in shifts, asymmetries, and broadening of the measured atom-loss spectra. The experiment is analyzed within a one-body density-matrix approach, accounting for interaction-induced level shifts and dephasing through nonlinear terms that approximately incorporate correlations due to the Rydberg blockade. This description yields good agreement with our experimental observations for short excitation times. For longer excitation times, the loss spectrum is altered qualitatively, suggesting additional dephasing mechanisms beyond the standard blockade mechanism based on pure van der Waals interactions.

The semiclassical convergent close-coupling approach to ion-atom collisions has been extended to include electron-transfer channels. The approach has been applied to study the excitation and the electron-capture processes in proton-hydrogen collisions. The integral alignment parameter $A_{20}$ for polarization of Lyman-$\alpha$ emission and the cross sections for excitation and electron-capture into the lowest excited states have been calculated for a wide range of the proton impact energies from 1 keV to 1 MeV. The results are in good agreement with experimental measurements.

We investigate the superfluid behavior of a Bose-Einstein condensate of ${}^6\mathrm{Li}$ molecules. In the experiment by Weimer et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 114, 095301 (2015)] a condensate is stirred by a weak, red-detuned laser beam along a circular path around the trap center. The rate of induced heating increases steeply above a velocity $v_c$, which we define as the critical velocity. Below this velocity, the moving beam creates almost no heating. In this paper, we demonstrate a quantitative understanding of the critical velocity. Using both numerical and analytical methods, we identify the nonzero temperature, the circular motion of the stirrer, and the density profile of the cloud as key factors influencing the magnitude of $v_c$. A direct comparison to the experimental data shows excellent agreement.

We investigate the ground-state behavior of Jaynes-Cummings-Hubbard lattices in the presence of a synthetic magnetic field, via a Gutzwiller ansatz. Specifically, we study the superfluid-Mott transition and the formation of vortex lattices in the superfluid regime. We find a suppression of the superfluid fraction due to the frustration induced by the incommensurate magnetic and spacial lattice lengths. We also predict the formation of triangular vortex lattices inside the superfluid regime.

Our experimental scheme is based on a barrel optical microresonator filled with a dye solution. The barrel mirror provides a confining potential, a chemical potential, and an effective mass for a photon, making the system formally equivalent to a one-dimensional gas of harmonically trapped, number-conserving, and massive bosons. Within the framework of quantum statistical mechanics, we propose an exact analytical solution to the problem of Bose-Einstein condensation in harmonically trapped, one-dimensional, and ideal photons. It is found that the photon number of vapor is characterized by an analytical function, which involves a $q$-digamma function in mathematics. The numerical calculation of the analytical solution gives many interesting results. In the thermodynamic limit, the analytical expressions of the critical temperature and the condensate fraction are derived. We find that the spectral radiance of a one-dimensional barrel cavity has a sharp peak at the frequency of the cavity cutoff when the photon number exceeds the critical value determined by a temperature.

We derive composite pulse sequences that achieve high-fidelity excitation of two-state systems in an optically dense, inhomogeneously broadened ensemble. The composite pulses are resistant to distortions due to the backaction of the medium they propagate in and are able to create high-fidelity inversion to optical depths $\alpha z>10$. They function well with smooth pulse shapes used for coherent control of optical atomic transitions in quantum computation and communication. They are an intermediary solution between single $\pi$-pulse excitation schemes and adiabatic passage schemes, being far more error tolerant than the former but still considerably faster than the latter.

We consider a two-level system with both a transversal and a longitudinal coupling to the electromagnetic field of a resonator. Using a polaron transformation, this Hamiltonian can be mapped onto a Jaynes-Cummings Hamiltonian with generalized field operators acting on the electromagnetic field in the resonator. In contrast to the usual ladder operators $a$ and $a^{†}$, these operators exhibit a nonmonotonous coupling strength with respect to the number $n$ of photons in the resonator. In particular, there are roots of the coupling between qubit and resonator at certain photon numbers $n_0$. We show that this effect can be exploited to generate photon-number squeezed light, characterized by a Fano factor $F\ll 1$, with a large number of photons (e.g., of the order of $1\times {10}^4$).

Spatiotemporal propagation dynamics of optical pulses in a multimode hollow-core fiber filled with prealigned molecular gases is numerically studied. Due to the use of accurate models, several interesting results are obtained, such as the periodic spatiotemporal evolution behavior, the formation of a stable donut-shaped beam profile, and the increasing of pulse energy during frequency upconversion. It is the use of hollow-core fibers that enables these behaviors to be observed. These observations enrich our understanding of optical pulse propagation dynamics and will benefit relevant technologies.

In the last few years, several criteria to identify Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen steering have been proposed and experimentally implemented. On the operational side, however, the evaluation of the steerability degree of a given state has shown to be a difficult task and only a few results are known. In this work, we propose a measure of steering that is based on the maximal violation of well-established steering inequalities. Applying this approach to two-qubit states, we managed to derive simple closed formulas for steering in the two- and three-measurement scenarios. We also provide closed formulas for quantifiers of Bell nonlocality in the respective scenarios. Finally, we show that our measures of steering verify the entanglement-steering-nonlocality hierarchy and reproduce results reported so far.

A method is presented for determining inner- and outer-electron radial density functions for two-electron systems by partitioning the fully correlated, two-electron, radial density function. This is applied to the helium isoelectronic series ($Z=1$ to 10 and 100) and the critical nuclear charge system, which has the minimum charge for which the atomic system has at least one bound state, to separate out the motions of the two electrons in both weakly and strongly bound systems. It is found that the inner electron experiences a negative screening effect due to the perturbation by the other electron. This is quantified and shown to increase with increasing $Z$. For the weakly bound systems the inner radial density distribution closely resembles that of a hydrogenic atom with the outer radial density distribution becoming very diffuse.

We consider the interaction of hydrogenlike atoms with a strong laser field and show that the strong-field approximation and all its variants may be grouped into a set of families of approximation schemes. This is done by introducing an Ansatz describing the electron wave packet as the sum of the initial-state wave function times a phase factor and a function which is the perturbative solution in the Coulomb potential of an inhomogeneous time-dependent Schrödinger equation. It is the phase factor that characterizes a given family. In each of these families, the velocity and length gauge version of the approximation scheme lead to the same results at each order in the Coulomb potential. By contrast, irrespective of the gauge, approximation schemes belonging to different families give different results. Furthermore, this formulation of the strong-field approximations allows us to gain deeper insight into the validity of the strong-field approximation schemes. In particular, we address two important questions: the role of the Coulomb potential in the output channel and the convergence of the perturbative series in the Coulomb potential. In all the physical situations we consider here, our results are compared to those obtained by solving numerically the time-dependent Schrödinger equation.

In this work we study spherical shell dark soliton states in three-dimensional atomic Bose-Einstein condensates. Their symmetry is exploited in order to analyze their existence, as well as that of topologically charged variants of the structures, and, importantly, to identify their linear stability Bogoliubov–de Gennes spectrum. We compare our effective one-dimensional spherical and two-dimensional cylindrical computations with the full three-dimensional numerics. An important conclusion is that such spherical shell solitons can be stable sufficiently close to the linear limit of the isotropic condensates considered herein. We have also identified their instabilities leading to the emergence of vortex line and vortex ring cages. In addition, we generalize effective particle pictures of lower-dimensional dark solitons and ring dark solitons to the spherical shell solitons concerning their equilibrium radius and effective dynamics around it. In this case too, we favorably compare, qualitatively and quantitatively, the resulting predictions such as the shell equilibrium radius with full numerical solutions in three dimensions.

A recent experiment has detected collision-induced frequency shifts in bright matter-wave solitons [J. H. V. Nguyen et al., Nat. Phys. 10, 918 (2014)]. Using a particle model, we derive the frequency shift for two solitons in a harmonic trap, and compare it to the recent experimental results and reported theoretical approximation. We find regimes where the frequency shift is much smaller than previously predicted, and propose experiments to test these findings. We also predict that reducing the experimental trap frequency will reveal soliton molecules or soliton bound states in a cold-atom system. The bound-state dynamics are found to be both highly phase dependent and sensitive to the residual 3D nature of the experiment.

Trapping ultracold atoms in optical lattices enabled numerous breakthroughs uniting several disciplines. Coupling these systems to quantized light leads to a plethora of new phenomena and has opened up a new field of study. Here we introduce an unusual additional source of competition in a many-body strongly correlated system: We prove that quantum backaction of global measurement is able to efficiently compete with intrinsic short-range dynamics of an atomic system. The competition becomes possible due to the ability to change the spatial profile of a global measurement at a microscopic scale comparable to the lattice period without the need of single site addressing. In coherence with a general physical concept, where new competitions typically lead to new phenomena, we demonstrate nontrivial dynamical effects such as large-scale multimode oscillations, long-range entanglement, and correlated tunneling, as well as selective suppression and enhancement of dynamical processes beyond the projective limit of the quantum Zeno effect. We demonstrate both the breakup and protection of strongly interacting fermion pairs by measurement. Such a quantum optical approach introduces into many-body physics novel processes, objects, and methods of quantum engineering, including the design of many-body entangled environments for open systems.

We report families of two-dimensional (2D) composite solitons in spinor dipolar Bose-Einstein condensates, with two localized components linearly mixed by the spin-orbit coupling (SOC), and the intrinsic nonlinearity represented by the dipole-dipole interaction (DDI) between atomic magnetic moments polarized in plane by an external magnetic field. Recently, stable solitons were predicted in the form of semivortices (composites built of coupled fundamental and vortical components) in the 2D system combining the SOC and contact attractive interactions. Replacing the latter by the anisotropic long-range DDI, we demonstrate that, for a fixed norm of the soliton, the system supports a continuous family of stable spatially asymmetric vortex solitons (AVSs), parameterized by an offset of the pivot of the vortical component relative to its fundamental counterpart. The offset is limited by a certain maximum value, while the energy of the AVS practically does not depend on the offset. At small values of the norm, the vortex solitons are subject to a weak oscillatory instability. In the present system, with the Galilean invariance broken by the SOC, the composite solitons are set in motion by a kick the strength of which exceeds a certain depinning value. The kicked solitons feature a negative effective mass, drifting along a spiral trajectory opposite to the direction of the kick. A critical angular velocity, up to which the semivortices may follow rotation of the polarizing magnetic field, is found too.