We study the properties of an array of QED cavities coupled by nonlinear elements in the presence of photon leakage and driven by a coherent source. The main effect of the nonlinear couplings is to provide an effective cross-Kerr interaction between nearest-neighbor cavities. Additionally, correlated photon hopping between neighboring cavities arises. We provide a detailed mean-field analysis of the steady-state phase diagram as a function of the system parameters, the leakage, and the external driving and show the emergence of a number of different quantum phases. A photon crystal associated with a spatial modulation of the photon blockade appears. The steady state can also display oscillating behavior and bistability. In some regions the crystalline ordering may coexist with the oscillating behavior. Furthermore, we study the effect of short-range quantum fluctuations by employing a cluster mean-field analysis. Focusing on the corrections to the photon crystal boundaries, we show that, apart for some quantitative differences, the cluster mean field supports the findings of the simple single-site analysis. In the last part of the paper we concentrate on the possibility of building up the class of arrays introduced here, by means of superconducting circuits of existing technology. We consider a realistic choice of the parameters for this specific implementation and discuss some properties of the steady-state phase diagram.

We present a theoretical study of a one-photon wave packet scattered by two atoms in a one-dimensional waveguide. We investigate the role of terms beyond the rotating-wave approximation to correctly take into account the effects of the virtual photons that are exchanged between the atoms. These terms are shown to drastically influence the reflected and the transmitted fields, imposing strict constraints on their temporal envelopes.

We address the physics of equilibration in ultracold atomic gases following a quench of the interaction parameter. Our work is based on a bath model which generates damping of the bosonic excitations. We illustrate this dissipative behavior through the momentum distribution of the excitations $n_k$, observing that larger $k$ modes have shorter relaxation times $\tau \left(k\right)$; they will equilibrate faster, as has been claimed in recent experimental work. We identify three time regimes. At short times $n_k$ exhibits oscillations; these are damped out at intermediate times where the system appears to be in a false or slowly converging equilibrium. Finally, at longer times, full equilibration occurs. This false equilibrium is, importantly, associated with the $k$ dependence in $\tau \left(k\right)$ and has implications for experiment.

It has been proved by Kempe that discrete quantum walks on the hypercube (HC) hit exponentially faster than the classical analog. The same was also observed numerically by Krovi and Brun for a slightly different property, namely, the expected hitting time. Yet, to what extent this striking result survives in more general graphs is to date an open question. Here, we tackle this question by studying the expected hitting time for quantum walks on HCs that are embedded into larger symmetric structures. By performing numerical simulations of the discrete quantum walk and deriving a general expression for the classical hitting time, we observe an exponentially increasing gap between the expected classical and quantum hitting times, not only for walks on the bare HC, but also for a large family of embedded HCs. This suggests that the quantum speedup is stable with respect to such embeddings.

We consider a bound system of particles interacting via electromagnetic forces in an external electromagnetic field, including leading relativistic corrections. Each particle has a definite mass, charge, spin, and charge radius. We introduce suitable canonical transformations and a perturbation scheme to obtain a Hamiltonian which describes the global dynamics of the system. This enables the derivation of formulas for various electromagnetic moments, such as the magnetic dipole moment, the mean-square charge radius, and the electric dipole polarizability.

The Higgs mode corresponds to the collective motion of particles due to the vibrations of an invisible field. It plays a fundamental role in our understanding of both low- and high-energy physics, giving elementary particles their mass and leading to collective modes in condensed-matter and nuclear systems. The Higgs mode has been observed in a limited number of table-top systems, where it however is characterized by a short lifetime due to decay into a continuum of modes. A major goal which has remained elusive so far is, therefore, to realize a long-lived Higgs mode in a controllable system. Here, we show how an undamped Higgs mode can be observed unambiguously in a Fermi gas in a two-dimensional trap, close to a quantum phase transition between a normal and a superfluid phase. We develop a first-principles theory of the pairing and the associated collective modes, which is quantitatively reliable when the pairing energy is much smaller than the trap level spacing, yet simple enough to allow the derivation of analytical results. The theory includes the trapping potential exactly, which is demonstrated to stabilize the Higgs mode by making its decay channels discrete. It is shown to be realistic to realize the proposed system using atoms in microtraps. The unrivaled flexibility of atomic gases combined with the quantitatively accurate theory opens the door to a systematic study of the Higgs mode, including the role of confinement and finite-size effects.

Parametric down-conversion (PDC) forms one of the basic building blocks for quantum optical experiments. However, the intrinsic multimode spectral-temporal structure of pulsed PDC often poses a severe hindrance for the direct implementation of the heralding of pure single-photon states or, for example, continuous-variable entanglement distillation experiments. To get rid of multimode effects narrowband frequency filtering is frequently applied to achieve a single-mode behavior. A rigorous theoretical description to accurately describe the effects of filtering on PDC, however, is still missing. To date, the theoretical models of filtered PDC are rooted in the discrete-variable domain and only account for filtering in the low-gain regime, where only a few photon pairs are emitted at any single point in time. In this paper we extend these theoretical descriptions and put forward a simple model, which is able to accurately describe the effects of filtering on PDC in the continuous-variable domain. This developed straightforward theoretical framework enables us to accurately quantify the tradeoff between suppression of higher-order modes, reduced purity, and lowered Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen entanglement, when narrowband filters are applied to multimode type-II PDC.

The efficient initialization of a quantum system is a prerequisite for quantum technological applications. Here we show that several classes of quantum states of a harmonic oscillator can be efficiently prepared by means of a Jaynes-Cummings interaction with a single two-level system. This is achieved by suitably tailoring external fields which drive the dipole and/or the oscillator. The time-dependent dynamics that leads to the target state is identified by means of optimal control theory (OCT) based on Krotov's method. Infidelities below ${10}^{-4}$ can be reached for the parameters of the experiment of Raimond, Haroche, Brune and co-workers, where the oscillator is a mode of a high-Q microwave cavity and the dipole is a Rydberg transition of an atom. For this specific situation we analyze the limitations on the fidelity due to parameter fluctuations and identify robust dynamics based on pulses found using ensemble OCT. Our analysis can be extended to quantum-state preparation of continuous-variable systems in other platforms, such as trapped ions and circuit QED.

In this paper we present a theory that predicts the phase noise characteristics of self-sustained optomechanical oscillators. By treating the cavity optomechanical system as a feedback loop consisting of an optical cavity and a mechanical resonator, we analytically derive the transfer functions relating the amplitude and phase noise of all the relevant dynamical quantities from the quantum Langevin equations, and obtain a closed-form expression for the phase noise spectral densities contributed from thermomechanical noise, photon shot noise, and low-frequency technical laser noise. We numerically calculate the phase noise for various situations and perform a sample calculation for an experimentally demonstrated system. We also show that the presented model reduces to the well-known Leeson's phase noise model when the amplitude noise and the amplitude to phase noise intertransfers are ignored. This paper not only addresses the practical questions about oscillator phase noise characteristics but also presents a theoretical framework for studying cavity optomechanical systems with large oscillation amplitude.

A scheme is proposed to achieve substantial controllable phase modulation for a probe field propagating through a thermal atomic vapor in double-$\Lambda$ configuration. The phase modulation is based on manipulating the linear susceptibility of the probe field, paraxial diffraction is eliminated by exploiting the thermal motion of atoms, and residual absorption is compensated via an incoherent pump field. As a result of the homogeneous change in the refractive index, a strong controllable uniform phase modulation without paraxial diffraction is achieved essentially independent of the spatial profile or the intensity of the probe field. This phase shift can be controlled via the intensities of the control or the incoherent pump fields. A possible proof-of-principle experiment in alkali-metal atoms is discussed.

Quantum simulations of Bell inequality violations are numerically obtained using probabilistic phase-space methods, namely, the positive-$P$ representation. In this approach the moments of quantum observables are evaluated as moments of variables that have values outside the normal eigenvalue range. There is thus a parallel with quantum weak measurements and weak values. Nevertheless, the representation is exactly equivalent to quantum mechanics. A number of states violating Bell inequalities are sampled, demonstrating that these quantum paradoxes can be treated with probabilistic methods. We treat quantum dynamics by simulating the time evolution of the Bell state formed via parametric down-conversion and discuss multimode generalizations.

Successful implementation of a fault-tolerant quantum computation on a system of qubits places severe demands on the hardware used to control the many-qubit state. It is known that an accuracy threshold $P_a$ exists for any quantum gate that is to be used in such a computation. Specifically, the error probability $P_e$ for such a gate must fall below the accuracy threshold: $P_e<P_a$. Estimates of $P_a$ vary widely, although $P_a\sim {10}^{-4}$ has emerged as a challenging target for hardware designers. In this paper, we present a theoretical framework based on neighboring optimal control that takes as input a good quantum gate and returns a new gate with better performance. We illustrate this approach by applying it to all gates in a universal set of quantum gates produced using nonadiabatic rapid passage that has appeared in the literature. Performance improvements are substantial, both for ideal and nonideal controls. Under suitable conditions detailed in this paper, all gate error probabilities fall well below the target threshold of ${10}^{-4}$.

Any bipartite entanglement witness $W$ can be written as $W=c_{\sigma }I-\sigma$, where $\sigma$ is a quantum state, $I$ is the identity matrix, and $c_{\sigma }$ is a non-negative number. We present a general method to extend the given entanglement witness to multipartite cases via purification, partial purification, and direct tensor of the quantum state $\sigma$. Our methods extend $\sigma$ but leave the parameter $c_{\sigma }$ untouched. This is very valuable since the parameter is generally not easy to compute.

In this paper, we mainly study the local indistinguishability of mutually orthogonal product basis quantum states in the high-dimensional quantum systems. In the Hilbert space of $3\otimes 3$, Walgate and Hardy [Phys. Rev. Lett. 89, 147901 (2002)] presented a very simple proof for nonlocality of nine orthogonal product basis quantum states which are given by Bennett et al. [Phys. Rev. A 59, 1070 (1999)]. In the quantum system of $d\otimes d$, where $d$ is odd, we construct $d^2$ orthogonal product basis quantum states and prove these states are locally indistinguishable. Then we are able to construct some locally indistinguishable product basis quantum states in the multipartite systems. All these results reveal the phenomenon of “nonlocality without entanglement.”

Fully relativistic first-order perturbation theory calculations are made for the electron-impact ionization of the inner $K$, $L$, and $M$ subshells of uranium. One set of calculations only includes the two-body electrostatic interaction, while the other set includes the full two-body retarded electromagnetic interaction. The $K$ subshell calculations show large differences between the two sets of calculations, the $L$ subshell calculations show moderate differences, and the $M$ subshell calculations show small differences. The $M$ subshell calculations fall within the error bars of recent measurements [A. Moy et al., J. Phys. B 47, 055202 (2014)].

We investigate the many-body dissipative dynamics of fermionic atoms in an optical lattice in the presence of incoherent light scattering. Deriving and solving a master equation to describe this process microscopically for many particles, we observe contrasting behavior in terms of the robustness against this type of heating for different many-body states. In particular, we find that the magnetic correlations exhibited by a two-component gas in the Mott insulating phase should be particularly robust against decoherence from light scattering, because the decoherence in the lowest band is suppressed by a larger factor than the time scales for effective superexchange interactions that drive coherent dynamics. Furthermore, the derived formalism naturally generalizes to analogous states with $\text{SU}\left(N\right)$ symmetry. In contrast, for typical atomic and laser parameters, two-particle correlation functions describing bound dimers for strong attractive interactions exhibit superradiant effects due to the indistinguishability of off-resonant photons scattered by atoms in different internal states. This leads to rapid decay of correlations describing off-diagonal long-range order for these states. Our predictions should be directly measurable in ongoing experiments, providing a basis for characterizing and controlling heating processes in quantum simulation with fermions.

We theoretically investigate one-dimensional three-component spin-orbit-coupled Fermi gases in the presence of the Zeeman field. By solving the Bogoliubov-de Gennes equations, we obtain the phase diagram at a given chemical potential and order parameter. We show that, with increasing the intensity of the Zeeman field, in addition to undergoing a phase transition from Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) superfluid to topological superfluid, similar to the two-component system, the three-component system may exhibit some other interesting topological phase transitions. For example, by appropriately adjusting the chemical potential $\mu$, the system can be in a nontrivial topological superfluid in the whole region of the Zeeman field $h$. It also may initially be a topological superfluid and then translate to a topologically trivial BCS superfluid with increasing the field $h$. Even more exotically, the system may exhibit a re-entrance behavior, being a topological superfluid at small and large fields but a topologically trivial BCS superfluid in between at a mediate Zeeman field. It can therefore have two regions with zero-energy Majorana fermions. As a consequence of these interesting topological phase transitions, the system of the three-component spin-orbit-coupled Fermi gases in a certain parameter range is more optimizing for the experimental realization of the topological phase due to the smaller magnetic field needed. Thus, a promising candidate for the realization of the topological phase is proposed.