Filamentation and supercontinuum generation with 1.3-ps, 1055-nm laser pulses in YAG crystal is investigated numerically and experimentally. Numerical simulations based on solving the unidirectional nonparaxial propagation equation uncover that the self-focusing dynamics of a picosecond laser pulse markedly differs from that observed in a femtosecond filamentation regime. We show that spatiotemporal transformation of the picosecond pulse is governed by the free electron plasma, which defocuses and absorbs its rear part, resulting in the formation of several subpulses of femtosecond duration, which thereafter undergo peculiar spatiotemporal dynamics and have different contributions to spectral superbroadening. The numerical findings are confirmed experimentally by measuring the spatiotemporal intensity profiles of the wave packet at various stages of propagation where relevant events of the spectral broadening occur.

We have in mind a register of qubits for an quantum information system, and consider its decoherence in an idealized but typical situation. Spontaneous decay and other couplings to the far environment, considered as the world outside the quantum apparatus, will be neglected, while couplings to quantum states within the apparatus, i.e., to a near environment, are assumed to dominate. Thus the central system couples to the near environment, which in turn couples to a far environment. Considering that the dynamics in the near environment is not sufficiently well known or controllable, we shall use random matrix methods to obtain analytic results. We consider a simplified situation where the central system suffers weak dephasing from the near environment, which in turn is coupled randomly to the far environment. We find the anti-intuitive result that increasing the coupling between the near and far environment actually protects the central qubit.

We present a theoretical framework for describing an impurity in a trapped Bose system in one spatial dimension. The theory handles any external confinement, arbitrary mass ratios, and a weak interaction may be included between the Bose particles. To demonstrate our technique, we calculate the ground-state energy and properties of a sample system with eight bosons and find an excellent agreement with numerically exact results. Our theory can thus provide definite predictions for experiments in cold atomic gases.

In most torsion pendulum experiments, the force resolution is dominantly limited by thermal noise, which is proportional to the pendulum's intrinsic rigidity. Thus, increasing the rigidity directly, such as through increasing torsion fiber's diameter, will decrease the resolution. Here, we present a method to improve the rigidity of a pendulum indirectly through optomechanical control. In this method, for appropriate typical parameter values, the rigidity can be improved greatly. Meanwhile, the extra noise introduced, which our analysis focuses on, can be regulated within the thermal noise level, i.e., the force resolution may not decrease after optomechanical control. This can balance the conflict between large rigidity and high resolution.

It is an established fact that entanglement is a resource. Sharing an entangled state leads to nonlocal correlations and to violations of Bell inequalities. Such nonlocal correlations illustrate the advantage of quantum resources over classical resources. In this paper, we quantitatively study Bell inequalities with $2\times n$ inputs. As found in Gisin et al. [Int. J. Quantum. Inform. 05, 525 (2007)], quantum mechanical correlations cannot reach the algebraic bound for such inequalities. Here we uncover the heart of this effect, which we call the fraction of determinism. We show that any quantum statistics with two parties and $2\times n$ inputs exhibit a nonzero fraction of determinism, and we supply a quantitative bound for it. We then apply it to provide an explicit universal upper bound for Bell inequalities with $2\times n$ inputs. As our main mathematical tool, we introduce and prove a reverse triangle inequality, stating in a quantitative way that if some states are far away from a given state, then their mixture is also. The inequality is crucial in deriving the lower bound for the fraction of determinism, but is also of interest on its own.

A significant problem facing next-generation quantum technologies is how to generate and manipulate macroscopic entanglement in light and matter systems. Here we report a regime of dynamical light-matter behavior in which a giant, system-wide entanglement is generated by varying the light-matter coupling at intermediate velocities. This enhancement is far larger, broader ranged, and more experimentally accessible than that occurring near the quantum phase transition of the same model under adiabatic conditions. By appropriate choices of the coupling within this intermediate regime, the enhanced entanglement can be made to spread system-wide or to reside in each subsystem separately.

We introduce the concepts of cohering and decohering power of quantum channels. Using the axiomatic definition of the coherence measure, we show that the optimization required for calculations of these measures can be restricted to pure input states and hence greatly simplified. We then use two examples of this measure, one based on the skew information and the other based on the $l_1$ norm; we find the cohering and decohering measures of a number of one-, two-, and $n$-qubit channels. Contrary to the view at first glance, it is seen that quantum channels can have cohering power. It is also shown that a specific property of a qubit unitary map is that it has equal cohering and decohering power in any basis. Finally, we derive simple relations between cohering and decohering powers of unitary qubit gates and their tensor products, results which have physically interesting implications.

Experimental cross sections for single and double ionization of ${\mathrm{H}}_2\mathrm{O}$ by swift ${\mathrm{H}}^{+}$ with energy ranging from 0.3 to 2.0 MeV are reported. In this energy range the ionization is the dominant collision process and charge transfer reactions can be disregarded. A multihit coincidence technique is used to measure the ${\text{H}}^{+}+{\text{OH}}^{+}$ and ${\text{H}}^{+}+{\text{O}}^{+}$ fragmentation channels. Single- and double-hit differential measurements together with a semiempirical calculation allow separating quantitatively the prompt and Auger-like decay contributions to fragmentation following a vacancy in the $2a_1$ molecular orbital. Concerning the double-ionization channel, it is found that for lower energies the mechanism of a sequential double-electron removal, known as TS2, dominates. For energies above above 750 keV/u ionization resulting from a single vacancy followed by an Auger like deexcitation takes over the TS2, becoming the main contribution to the double-ionization cross section. Our results are compared to the electron-impact data within the same velocity range and also with theoretical calculations available in the literature.

There is an increasing interest in the extraction and control of the interfering quantum pathway amplitudes induced by control fields during laser-matter interactions. The Hamiltonian-encoding and observable-decoding (HE-OD) technique has been introduced for extracting the amplitudes of the pathways present in the dynamics and has recently been experimentally applied to the pathway manipulation of atomic rubidium. This paper theoretically explores various strategies for manipulating pathway amplitudes in the context of a laser field interacting with a multilevel system similar to atomic rubidium for both narrow-band and broadband ultrafast fields. In the perturbation regime, two second-order quantum pathways connecting the Rb states $5S_{1/2}$ and $5D_{3/2}$ dominate the dynamics, namely, $5S_{1/2}\to 5P_{3/2}\to 5D_{3/2}$ (pathway 1) and $5S_{1/2}\to 5P_{1/2}\to 5D_{3/2}$ (pathway 2). For narrow-band field control, the analysis is carried out in the time domain with the laser field including only four narrow-band envelope subpulses centered at the resonant frequencies. When the two pathways cooperate constructively, temporal oscillations appear in the ratio of the two pathway amplitudes, and we conclude in this case that the period corresponds to the detuning between transitions $5S_{1/2}\to 5P_{3/2}$ and $5P_{3/2}\to 5D_{3/2}$. For broadband field control, the dynamics are treated in the frequency domain with the laser field including both resonant and continuous nonresonant frequency components. Various control strategies based on manipulating the phase of selected spectral components are tested. Compared to the outcome from a transform limited pulse, a $\frac{\pi }{2}$ step scheme can increase the dynamic range of the ratio between the two pathway amplitudes by a factor of $\sim 3$. A scheme that manipulates eight spectral blocks, in which the spectral boundaries depend on the resonant frequencies, can increase the ratio by several orders of magnitude. Numerical simulations show that further dividing the spectrum into hundreds of evenly spaced blocks does not significantly enhance the pathway ratio over the eight-block scheme. The quantum control of pathways investigated in this work provides valuable insights on how to incorporate known information about the structure of quantum systems for the effective reduction of quantum control complexity.

We analyze the mean-field yrast spectrum of a two-component Bose gas in the ring geometry with arbitrary interaction asymmetry. Of particular interest is the possibility that the yrast spectrum develops local minima at which persistent superfluid flow can occur. By analyzing the mean-field energy functional, we show that local minima can be found at plane-wave states and arise when the system parameters satisfy certain inequalities. We then go on to show that these plane-wave states can be yrast states even when the yrast spectrum no longer exhibits a local minimum. Finally, we obtain conditions which establish when the plane-wave states cease to be yrast states. Specific examples illustrating the roles played by the various interaction asymmetries are presented.

We present a heralded photon source based only on linear optics and weak coherent states. By time-tuning a Hong-Ou-Mandel interferometer fed with frequency-displaced coherent states, the output photons can be synchronously heralded following sub-Poisson statistics, which is indicated by the second-order correlation function $\mathrm{[}{g}^2\left(0\right)=0.556]$. The absence of phase-matching restrictions makes the source widely tunable, with 100-nm spectral tunability on the telecom bands. The technique presents yield comparable to state-of-the-art spontaneous parametric down-conversion-based sources, with high coherence and fiber-optic quantum communication compatibility.

We report the creation of ultra-long-range ${\mathrm{Sr}}_2$ molecules comprising one ground-state $5s^2$ ${}^1{S}_0$ atom and one atom in a $5sns$ ${}^3{S}_1$ Rydberg state for $n$ ranging from 29 to 36. Molecules are created in a trapped ultracold atomic gas using two-photon excitation near resonant with the $5s5p$ ${}^3{P}_1$ intermediate state, and their formation is detected through ground-state atom loss from the trap. The observed molecular binding energies are reproduced with the aid of first-order perturbation theory that utilizes a Fermi pseudopotential with effective $s$-wave and $p$-wave scattering lengths to describe the interaction between an excited Rydberg electron and a ground-state Sr atom.

We apply a distance-based Bell-test analysis method [E. Knill et al., Phys. Rev. A 91, 032105 (2015)] to three experimental data sets where conventional analyses failed or required additional assumptions. The first is produced from a classical source exploiting a “coincidence-time loophole” for which standard analysis falsely shows a Bell violation. The second is from a source previously shown to violate a Bell inequality; the distance-based analysis agrees with the previous results but with fewer assumptions. The third data set does not show a violation with standard analysis despite the high source quality, but is shown to have a strong violation with the distance-based analysis method.

We investigate entanglement and quantum phase transition in a two-dimensional Heisenberg anisotropic spin-$1/2\mathit{XY}$ model, using the quantum renormalization-group method (QRG) on a square lattice of $N\times N$ sites. The entanglement through geometric average of concurrences is calculated after each step of the QRG. We show that the concurrence achieves a nonzero value at the critical point more rapidly as compared to the one-dimensional case. The relationship between the entanglement and the quantum phase transition is studied. The evolution of entanglement develops two saturated values corresponding to two different phases. We compute the derivative of the concurrence, which is found to be discontinuous at the critical point $\gamma =0$, and indicates a second-order phase transition in the spin system. Further, the scaling behavior of the system is investigated by computing the derivative of the concurrence in terms of the system size.

We have performed quantum-state tomography on several different single-photon entangled states, that is, states in which a single photon is shared between two possible paths. We begin by doing a tomographic reconstruction of density matrices in the subspace where a single photon is shared by two spatial modes. In this subspace we are able to create high-fidelity, path-entangled states. Also within this subspace we use the Akaike information criterion and Monte Carlo simulations to help us estimate the amount and source of state drift in our system. We find that the primary state drift is due to phase drifts and fluctuations on the order of $\pi /400$ in our experimental apparatus. We then use the single-photon subspace density matrices and further measurements to estimate density matrices in the larger space consisting of two modes containing up to one photon each. In this larger space we find that the concurrence of the density matrices is $C\cong 0.08$ and is greater than 0 by at least 45 standard deviations, indicating that our states are indeed entangled.

Quantum mechanical calculations of ultralow-energy collision of Coulomb three-body systems in the hyperspherical elliptic coordinates are presented. The nonadiabatic coupling between the hyperradius and hyperangular variables is treated with the slow-variable discretization method in combination with the $R$-matrix propagation technique. For scattering state calculations, the two-dimensional matching procedure using Gailitis's method [M. Gailitis, J. Phys. B 9, 843 (1976); C. Noble and R. Nesbet, Comput. Phys. Commun. 33, 399 (1984)] is implemented to determine the boundary conditions between the internal and the asymptotic wave functions. This method is proved to be very efficient and gives very accurate results. Taking advantage of this method, we accurately calculate the scattering phase shifts and the scattering lengths of Coulomb three-body systems with mass ratio varying over several orders of magnitudes. We observed jumps of the scattering length from $-\infty$ to $\infty$ at certain mass ratios and monotonic decreases between two jumps. These are closely related to the binding energy of the highest bound state through Levinson's theorem [N. Levinson, K. Dan. Vidensk. Selsk. Mat. Fys. Medd. 25, 9 (1949)]. Our calculations provide a comprehensive perspective to the scattering length from the variation of mass ratio of Coulomb three-body systems.

Thermalization of a system in the presence of a heat bath has been the subject of many theoretical investigations especially in the framework of solid-state physics. In this setting, the presence of a large bandwidth for the frequency distribution of the harmonic oscillators schematizing the heat bath is crucial, as emphasized in the Caldeira-Leggett model. By contrast, ultracold gases in atomic traps oscillate at well-defined frequencies and therefore seem to lie outside the Caldeira-Leggett paradigm. We introduce interaction Hamiltonians which allow us to adapt the model to an atomic physics framework. The intrinsic nonlinearity of these models differentiates them from the original Caldeira-Leggett model and calls for a nontrivial stability analysis to determine effective ranges for the model parameters. These models allow for molecular-dynamics simulations of mixtures of ultracold gases, which is of current relevance for optimizing sympathetic cooling in degenerate Bose-Fermi mixtures.

The topological property of a boson-fermion mixture in a one-dimensional optical superlattice is studied and the topological insulating phase of an interacting boson-fermion mixture characterized by a nontrivial Berry phase is identified. The single-particle and boson-fermion exchanging excitation spectrums are calculated and we identify the boson-fermion exchanging excitation as the gapless topological excitation in the topological phase of the mixture. The different kinds of excitations are explained explicitly from the competition among the bulk gap, the on-site boson-boson, and boson-fermion interactions. The Hamiltonian studied has been partly realized in the state-of-art cold atom experiments, and the results are very relevant to the experiments.

The low-energy spectrum of $N$-boson clusters with pairwise zero-range interactions is believed to be governed by a three-body parameter. We study the ground state of $N$-boson clusters with infinite two-body $s$-wave scattering length by performing ab initio Monte Carlo simulations. To prevent Thomas collapse, different finite-range three-body regulators are used. The energy and structural properties for the three-body Hamiltonian with two-body zero-range interactions and three-body regulator are in much better agreement with the “ideal zero-range Efimov theory” results than those for Hamiltonian with two-body finite-range interactions. For larger clusters we find that the ground-state energy and structural properties of the Hamiltonian with two-body zero-range interactions and finite-range three-body regulators are not universally determined by the three-body parameter, i.e., dependencies on the specific form of the three-body regulator are observed. For comparison, we consider Hamiltonian with two-body van der Waals interactions and no three-body regulator. For the interactions considered, the ground-state energy of the $N$-body clusters is—if scaled by the three-body ground-state energy—fairly universal, i.e., the dependence on the short-range details of the two-body van der Waals potentials is small. Our results are compared with those in the literature.