The development of the relativistic all-order method where all single, double, and partial triple excitations of the Dirac-Hartree-Fock wave function are included to all orders of perturbation theory led to many important results for the study of fundamental symmetries, development of atomic clocks, ultracold atom physics, and others, as well as provided recommended values of many atomic properties critically evaluated for their accuracy for a large number of monovalent systems. This approach requires iterative solutions of the linearized coupled-cluster equations leading to convergence issues in some cases where correlation corrections are particularly large or lead to an oscillating pattern. Moreover, these issues also lead to similar problems in the configuration-interaction (CI)$+$all-order method for many-particle systems. In this work, we have resolved most of the known convergence problems by applying two different convergence stabilizer methods, namely, reduced linear equation and direct inversion of iterative subspace. Examples are presented for B, Al, Zn${}^{+}$, and Yb${}^{+}$. Solving these convergence problems greatly expands the number of atomic species that can be treated with the all-order methods and is anticipated to facilitate many interesting future applications.

In this work we theoretically consider the Casimir force between two periodic arrays of nanowires (both in vacuum, and on a substrate separated by a fluid) at separations comparable to the period. Specifically, we compute the dependence of the exact Casimir force between the arrays under both lateral translations and rotations. Although typically the force between such structures is well characterized by the proximity force approximation (PFA), we find that in the present case the microstructure modulates the force in a way qualitatively inconsistent with PFA. We find instead that effective-medium theory, in which the slabs are treated as homogeneous, anisotropic dielectrics, gives a surprisingly accurate picture of the force, down to separations of half the period. This includes a situation for identical, fluid-separated slabs in which the exact force changes sign with the orientation of the wire arrays, whereas PFA predicts attraction. We discuss the possibility of detecting these effects in experiments, concluding that this effect is strong enough to make detection possible in the near future.

We report calculations of ${\mathrm{H}}_2$ ${\Sigma }^{-}$ states using a variational $R$-matrix approach combined with multichannel quantum defect theory. Several Rydberg series converging to the $2p\pi$ state of the ${\mathrm{H}}_2^{\hspace{0.5em}+}$ ion core are established and their mutual channel interactions characterized. The influence of the external electron on the chemical bond is found to be particularly strong in these electronically and chemically weakly bound states.

We study the changes in the spatial distribution of vortices in a rotating Bose-Einstein condensate due to an increasing eccentricity of the trapping potential. By breaking the rotational symmetry, the vortex system undergoes a rich variety of structural changes, including the formation of zigzag and linear configurations. These spatial rearrangements are well signaled by the change in the behavior of the vortex-pattern eigenmodes against the eccentricity parameter. This behavior allows to actively control the distribution of vorticity in many-body systems and opens the possibility of studying interactions between quantum vortices over a large range of parameters.

We study periodic crystalline spin textures in spinor condensates with dipolar interactions via a systematic symmetry analysis of the low-energy effective theory. By considering symmetry operations which combine real- and spin-space operations, we classify symmetry groups consistent with nontrivial experimental and theoretical constraints. Minimizing the energy within each symmetry class allows us to explore possible ground states.

We study the low-energy effective theory of spinor condensate ferromagnets for the superfluid velocity and magnetization degrees of freedom. This effective theory describes the competition between spin stiffness and a long-range interaction between skyrmions, topological objects familiar from the theory of ordinary ferromagnets. We find exact solutions to the nonlinear equations of motion describing neutral configurations of skyrmions and antiskyrmions. These analytical solutions provide a simple physical picture for the origin of crystalline magnetic order in spinor condensate ferromagnets with dipolar interactions. We also point out the connections to effective theories for quantum Hall ferromagnets.

We explore the feasibility of the generation of pseudonondiffracting optical beams related to crystal and quasicrystal structures. It is experimentally confirmed that optical crystal and quasicrystal beams can be remarkably generated with a collimated light to illuminate a high-precision mask with multiple apertures regularly distributed on a ring. We also found that exotic kaleidoscopic patterns can be exhibited with the high-order quasicrystal beams. More importantly, the structures of phase singularities in optical quasicrystal beams are manifested.

Analyses of phenomena exhibiting finite-time decay of quantum entanglement have recently attracted considerable attention. Such decay is often referred to as sudden vanishing (or sudden death) of entanglement, which can be followed by its sudden reappearance (or sudden rebirth). We analyze various finite-time decays (for dissipative systems) and analogous periodic vanishings (for unitary systems) of nonclassical correlations as described by violations of classical inequalities and the corresponding nonclassicality witnesses (or quantumness witnesses), which are not necessarily entanglement witnesses. We show that these sudden vanishings are universal phenomena and can be observed: (i) not only for two- or multimode but also for single-mode nonclassical fields, (ii) not solely for dissipative systems, and (iii) at evolution times which are usually different from those of sudden vanishings and reappearances of quantum entanglement.

We study a cold atomic sample coherently driven into the five-level triple-$\Lambda$ configuration for attaining a dynamically controlled triple photonic band-gap structure. Our numerical calculations show that three photonic band gaps with homogeneous reflectivities up to $92\%$ can be induced on demand around the probe resonance by a standing-wave driving field in the presence of spontaneously generated coherence. All these photonic band gaps are severely malformed with probe reflectivities declining rapidly to very low values when spontaneously generated coherence is gradually weakened. The triple photonic band-gap structure can also be attained in a five-level chain-$\Lambda$ system of cold atoms in the absence of spontaneously generated coherence, which however requires two additional traveling-wave fields to couple relevant levels.

The ground states of some many-body quantum systems can serve as resource states for the one-way quantum computing model, achieving the full power of quantum computation. Such resource states are found, for example, in spin-$\frac{5}{2}$ and spin-$\frac{3}{2}$ systems. It is, of course, desirable to have a natural resource state in a spin-$\frac{1}{2}$, that is, qubit system. Here, we give a negative answer to this question for frustration-free systems with two-body interactions. In fact, it is shown to be impossible for any genuinely entangled qubit state to be a nondegenerate ground state of any two-body frustration-free Hamiltonian. What is more, we also prove that every spin-$\frac{1}{2}$ frustration-free Hamiltonian with two-body interaction always has a ground state that is a product of single- or two-qubit states. In other words, there cannot be any interesting entanglement features in the ground state of such a qubit Hamiltonian.

We present a reliable algorithm to evaluate quantum discord for general two-qubit states, amending and extending an approach recently put forward for the subclass of $X$ states. A closed expression for the discord of arbitrary states of two qubits cannot be obtained, as the optimization problem for the conditional entropy requires the solution to a pair of transcendental equations in the state parameters. We apply our algorithm to run a numerical comparison between quantum discord and an alternative, computable measure of nonclassical correlations, namely, the geometric discord. We identify the extremally nonclassically correlated two-qubit states according to the (normalized) geometric discord, at a fixed value of the conventional quantum discord. The latter cannot exceed the square root of the former for systems of two qubits.

Berry's phase for a whole turn in a conical rotation of the magnetic field with a semiangle θ has been clearly manifested free from the dynamical phase shift using the magnetic-field-insensitive two-photon transitions between sodium-ground hyperfine states having different signs of the $g$ factors. The solid angles for states with a positive $g$ factor and with a negative $g$ factor are verified to be $2\pi (1-\cos \theta )$ and $-2\pi (1+\cos \theta )$, respectively, for a right-handed rotation of a magnetic field and a semiangle of $0⩽\theta ⩽\pi /2$.

We introduce a quantum packing bound on the minimal resources required by nondegenerate error-correction codes for any kind of noise. We prove that degenerate codes can outperform nondegenerate ones in the presence of correlated noise, by exhibiting examples where the quantum packing bound is violated.

We analyze the entanglement tradeoff between particle and antiparticle modes of a Dirac field from the perspective of inertial and uniformly accelerated observers. Our results show that a redistribution of entanglement between particle and antiparticle modes plays a key role in the survival of femionic field entanglement in the infinite-acceleration limit.

We report theoretical calculations of the effect of the multiple-orbital contribution in high-order harmonic generation (HHG) of aligned CO${}_2$ with the inclusion of macroscopic propagation of harmonic fields in the medium. Our results show very good agreement with recent experiments for the dynamics of the minimum in HHG spectra as laser intensity or alignment angle changes. Calculations are carried out to check how the position of the minimum in HHG spectra depends on the degrees of molecular alignment, laser-focusing conditions, and the effects of alignment-dependent ionization rates of the different molecular orbitals. These analyses help to explain why the minima observed in different experiments may vary.

We report results of a systematic analysis of matter-wave gap solitons (GSs) in three-dimensional self-repulsive Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) loaded into a combination of a cigar-shaped trap and axial optical-lattice (OL) potential. Basic cases of the strong, intermediate, and weak radial (transverse) confinement are considered, as well as settings with shallow and deep OL potentials. Only in the case of the shallow lattice combined with tight radial confinement, which actually has little relevance to realistic experimental conditions, does the usual one-dimensional (1D) cubic Gross-Pitaevskii equation (GPE) furnish a sufficiently accurate description of GSs. However, the effective 1D equation with the nonpolynomial nonlinearity, derived in Ref. [Phys. Rev. A 77, 013617 (2008)], provides for quite an accurate approximation for the GSs in all cases, including the situation with weak transverse confinement, when the soliton’s shape includes a considerable contribution from higher-order transverse modes, in addition to the usual ground-state wave function of the respective harmonic oscillator. Both fundamental GSs and their multipeak bound states are considered. The stability is analyzed by means of systematic simulations. It is concluded that almost all the fundamental GSs are stable, while their bound states may be stable if the underlying OL potential is deep enough.

We consider a mixture of hard-core bosonic polar molecules, interacting via repulsive dipole-dipole interaction, and one atomic bosonic species. The mixture is confined on a two-dimensional square lattice and, at low enough temperatures, can be described by the two-component Bose-Hubbard model. The latter displays an extremely rich phase diagram including solid, superfluid, and supersolid phases. Here, we mainly focus on the checkerboard molecular solid, stabilized by the long-range dipolar interaction, and study how the presence of atoms affects its robustness both at zero and finite temperatures. We find that, due to atom-molecule interactions, solid phases can be stabilized at both (much) lower strengths of dipolar interaction and higher temperatures, than when no atoms are present. As a byproduct, atoms also order in a solid phase with the same melting temperatures as for molecules. Finally, we find that for large enough interaction between atoms and molecules, a paired supersolid phase can be stabilized.

Electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) has mainly been modeled for three-level systems. In particular, considerable interest has been dedicated to the $\Lambda$ configuration, with two ground states and one excited state. However, in the alkali-metal atoms, which are commonly used, the hyperfine interaction in the excited state introduces several levels which simultaneously participate in the scattering process. When the Doppler broadening is comparable with the hyperfine splitting in the upper state, the three-level $\Lambda$ model does not reproduce the experimental results. Here we theoretically investigate the EIT in a hot vapor of alkali-metal atoms and demonstrate that it can be strongly reduced by the presence of multiple excited levels. Given this model, we also show that well-designed optical pumping enables us to significantly recover the transparency.

We study the coherent storage and retrieval of a very short multimode light pulse in an atomic ensemble. We consider a quantum memory process based on the conversion of a signal pulse into a long-lived spin coherence via light matter interaction in an on-resonant $\Lambda$ -type system. In order to study the writing and reading processes we analytically solve the partial differential equations describing the evolution of the field and of the atomic coherence in time as well as in space. We show how to optimize the process for writing as well as for reading. If the medium length is fixed, for each length, there is an optimal value of the pulse duration. We discuss the information capacity of this memory scheme and we estimate the number of transverse modes that can be stored as a quantum hologram.

We theoretically demonstrate the population switching of quantum dots (QD’s), modeled as two-level atoms in idealized one-dimensional (1D) and two-dimensional (2D) photonic crystals (PC’s) by self-consistent solution of the Maxwell-Bloch equations. In our semiclassical theory, energy states of the electron are quantized, and electron dynamics is described by the atomic Bloch equation, while electromagnetic waves satisfy the classical Maxwell equations. Near a waveguide cutoff in a photonic band gap, the local electromagnetic density of states (LDOS) and spontaneous emission rates exhibit abrupt changes with frequency, enabling large QD population inversion driven by both continuous and pulsed optical fields. We recapture and generalize this ultrafast population switching using the Maxwell-Bloch equations. Radiative emission from the QD is obtained directly from the surrounding PC geometry using finite-difference time-domain simulation of the electromagnetic field. The atomic Bloch equations provide a source term for the electromagnetic field. The total electromagnetic field, consisting of the external input and radiated field, drives the polarization components of the atomic Bloch vector. We also include a microscopic model for phonon dephasing of the atomic polarization and nonradiative decay caused by damped phonons. Our self-consistent theory captures stimulated emission and coherent feedback effects of the atomic Mollow sidebands, neglected in earlier treatments. This leads to remarkable high-contrast QD-population switching with relatively modest (factor of 10) jump discontinuities in the electromagnetic LDOS. Switching is demonstrated in three separate models of QD’s placed (i) in the vicinity of a band edge of a 1D PC, (ii) near a cutoff frequency in a bimodal waveguide channel of a 2D PC, and (iii) in the vicinity of a localized defect mode side coupled to a single-mode waveguide channel in a 2D PC.