Light propagation in asymmetric Kerr-nonlinear multilayers with perfect transmission resonances is theoretically investigated. It is found that hybrid Fabry-Perot-resonator–photonic-crystal structures of the type $(\mathit{BA}){}^k(\mathit{AB}){}^k(\mathit{AABB}){}^m$ exhibit both pronounced unidirectionality (due to strong spatial asymmetry of the resonant mode) and high transmission (due to the existence of a perfect transmission resonance). This results in nonlinear optical diode action with low reflection losses without need for a pumping beam or input pulse modulation. By slightly perturbing the perfect transmission resonance condition, the operating regime of the optical diode can be tuned, with a tradeoff between minimizing the reflection losses and maximizing the frequency bandwidth where unidirectional transmission exists. Optical diode action is demonstrated in direct numerical simulation, showing >92% transmittance in one direction and about 22% in the other. The effect of perfect transmission resonance restoration induced by nonlinearity was observed analytically and numerically. The proposed geometry is shown to have advantages over previously reported designs based on photonic quasicrystals.

We study theoretically the effects of the presence of a plasmonic nanostructure on free-space spontaneous emission in a four-level quantum system, where one $\mathsf{V}$-type transition is influenced by the interaction with surface plasmons and the other $\mathsf{V}$-type transition occurs in free space. The plasmonic nanostructure that we consider is a two-dimensional array of metal-coated dielectric nanospheres. We show that the spectrum of spontaneous emission in the free-space modes is strongly influenced by the presence of the plasmonic nanostructure, and we explore the dependence of the spectrum on different initial conditions of the quantum system and on the distance from the nanostructure.

We demonstrated a high-efficiency quantum random number generator which takes inherent advantage of the photon number distribution randomness of a coherent light source. This scheme was realized by comparing the photon flux of consecutive pulses with a photon number resolving detector. The random bit generation rate could reach $2.4$ MHz with a system clock of $6.0$ MHz, corresponding to a random bit generation efficiency as high as $40\%$. The random number files passed all the stringent statistical tests.

We present experimental and numerical investigations of optical extreme (rogue) event statistics recorded in the regime of femtosecond pulse filamentation in water. In the spectral domain, the extreme events manifest themselves as either large or small extremes of the spectral intensity, justified by right- or left-tailed statistical distributions, respectively. In the time domain, the observed extreme events are associated with pulse splitting and energy redistribution in space and therefore are exquisitely linked to three-dimensional, spatiotemporal dynamics and formation of the $X$ waves.

We present a broad class of $N$-qubit Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ)-diagonal states such that nonpositivity under the partial transpose operation is necessary and sufficient for the presence of entanglement, including many naturally arising instances such as dephased GHZ states. Furthermore, our proof directly leads to an entanglement witness which saturates this bound. The witness is applied to thermal GHZ states to prove that the entanglement can be extremely robust to system imperfections.

In a recent work [Liew and Savona, Phys. Rev. Lett. 104, 183601 (2010)] it was numerically shown that a resonantly driven photonic “molecule” consisting of two coupled cavities can exhibit strong photon antibunching with a surprisingly weak Kerr nonlinearity. Here, we analytically identify the subtle quantum interference effect that is responsible for the predicted efficient photon blockade effect. We then extend the theory to the experimentally relevant Jaynes-Cummings system consisting of a single quantum emitter in a coupled-cavity structure and predict the strong antibunching even for single-atom cooperativity on the order of or smaller than unity. The potential of this quantum interference effect in the realization of strongly correlated photonic systems with only weak material nonlinearities is assessed by comparing on-site and inter-site correlations in a ring of three coupled photonic molecules.

Quantum metrology uses small changes in the output probabilities of a quantum measurement to estimate the magnitude of a weak interaction with the system. The sensitivity of this procedure depends on the relation between the input state, the measurement results, and the generator observable describing the effect of the weak interaction on the system. This is similar to the situation in weak measurements, where the weak value of an observable exhibits a symmetric dependence on initial and final conditions. In this paper, it is shown that the phase sensitivity of a quantum measurement is in fact given by the variance of the imaginary parts of the weak values of the generator over the different measurement outcomes. It is then possible to include the limitations of a specific quantum measurement in the uncertainty bound for phase estimates by subtracting the variance of the real parts of the weak values from the initial generator uncertainty. This uncertainty relation can be interpreted as the time-symmetric formulation of the uncertainty limit of quantum metrology, where the real parts of the weak values represent the information about the generator observable in the final measurement result.

We present a dispersive-coupling-based interpretation for the quantum Zeno effect (QZE) where measurements are dynamically treated as dispersive couplings of the measured system to the apparatus rather than the von Neumann’s projections. It is found that the explicit dependence of the survival probability on the decoherence time quantitatively distinguishes this dynamic QZE from the usual one based on projection measurements. By revisiting the cavity-QED experiment of the QZE [J. Bernu et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 101, 180402 (2008)], we suggest an alternative scheme to verify our theoretical consideration that frequent measurements slow down the increase of photon number inside a microcavity due to the nondemolition couplings with the atoms in large detuning.

We present a hybrid model of the unitary-evolution-based quantum computation model and the measurement-based quantum computation model. In the hybrid model, part of a quantum circuit is simulated by unitary evolution and the rest by measurements on star graph states, thereby combining the advantages of the two standard quantum computation models. In the hybrid model, a complicated unitary gate under simulation is decomposed in terms of a sequence of single-qubit operations, the controlled-z gates, and multiqubit rotations around the $z$ axis. Every single-qubit and the controlled-z gate are realized by a respective unitary evolution, and every multiqubit rotation is executed by a single measurement on a required star graph state. The classical information processing in our model requires only an information flow vector and propagation matrices. We provide the implementation of multicontrol gates in the hybrid model. They are very useful for implementing Grover’s search algorithm, which is studied as an illustrative example.

We examine a search on a graph among a number of different kinds of objects (vertices), one of which we want to find. In a standard graph search, all of the vertices are the same, except for one, the marked vertex, and that is the one we wish to find. We examine the case in which the unmarked vertices can be of different types, so the background against which the search is done is not uniform. We find that the search can still be successful, but the probability of success is lower than in the uniform background case, and that probability decreases with the number of types of unmarked vertices. We also show how the graph searches can be rephrased as equivalent oracle problems.

Maximally entangled states (MES) represent a valuable resource in quantum information processing. In $N$-qubit systems the MES are $N$-GHZ states [i.e., the collection of $|{\mathrm{GHZ}}_N\rangle =\frac{1}{\sqrt{2}}(|00\dots 0\rangle +|11\dots 1\rangle )]$ and its local unitary (LU) equivalences. While it is well known that such states are uniquely stabilized by $N$ commuting observables, in this article we consider the minimum number of noncommuting observables needed to characterize an $N$-qubit MES as the unique common eigenstate. Here, we prove, rather surprisingly, that in this general case any $N$-GHZ state can be uniquely stabilized by only two observables. Thus, for the task of MES certification, only two correlated measurements are required with each party observing the spin of his or her system along one of two directions.

We present an approach to induce localization of a Bose-Einstein condensate in a one-dimensional lattice under the influence of unitary quantum-walk evolution using disordered quantum coin operation. We introduce a discrete-time quantum-walk model in which the interference effect is modified to diffuse or strongly localize the probability distribution of the particle by assigning a different set of coin parameters picked randomly for each step of the walk, respectively. Spatial localization of the particle or state is explained by comparing the variance of the probability distribution of the quantum walk in position space using disordered coin operation to that of the walk using an identical coin operation for each step. Due to the high degree of control over quantum coin operation and most of the system parameters, ultracold atoms in an optical lattice offer opportunities to implement a disordered quantum walk that is unitary and induces localization. Here we present a scheme to use a Bose-Einstein condensate that can be evolved to the superposition of its internal states in an optical lattice and control the dynamics of atoms to observe localization. This approach can be adopted to any other physical system in which controlled disordered quantum walk can be implemented.

We study the level surfaces of quantum discord for a class of two-qubit states with parallel nonzero Bloch vectors. The dynamic behavior of quantum discord under decoherence is investigated. It is shown that a class of $X$ states has sudden transition between classical and quantum correlations under decoherence. Our results include the ones in M. D. Lang and C. M. Caves [Phys. Rev. Lett. 105, 150501 (2010)] as a special case and show new pictures and structures of quantum discord.

The decay of excited aluminum-cluster anions (Al${}_n^{-}$, $n=4$ and 5) has been investigated in a cryogenic linear ion-beam trap. A power-law is found to accurately reproduce the time dependence of the observed decay rates at early storage times, although the exponents are significantly larger than the typically observed $1/t$ decay. It is shown that the power-law exponent is, at most, weakly dependent on the cluster electron affinity and heat capacity. A previous power-law exponent model for small clusters is also shown to be in disagreement with both investigated species. The attribution of a drop in the decay rate at later times to radiative cooling as observed in larger molecules also does not appear justified in our case. A strong dependence of the power-law exponent on the ambient temperature was observed.

We theoretically study the field-free molecular orientation by a multicolor laser field with a superposition of the fundamental wave and its harmonics. It is shown that the molecular orientation will be up to a maximum value pumped by the four-color laser field at the same laser intensity, and the molecular orientation direction and its degree can be controlled by varying the carrier-envelope phase of the four-color laser field. It is also indicated that the molecular orientation induced by a four-color laser field can be tremendously enhanced by applying another in-phase or out-phase four-color laser field at the beginning of the rotational wave-packet rephasing or the end of the rotational wave-packet dephasing.

Based on the nonperturbative quantum scattering theory of high-order harmonic generation (HHG) and using the linear combination of atomic orbitals theory of molecular orbitals, we derive the HHG rate formula for molecules. Employing the formula, we study the intensity dependence of the interference effect induced by the molecular structure. We find that the molecular HHG was modulated by the interference not only in the recombination process but also in the ionization process. The location of the interference minimum in HHG shifts to higher energy by a quantity of the ponderomotive energy as the laser intensity increases.

In this work, we theoretically construct exact mappings of many-particle bosonic systems onto quantum rotor models. In particular, we analyze the rotor representation of spinor Bose-Einstein condensates. In a previous work [R. Barnett et al., Phys. Rev. A 82, 031602(R) (2010)] it was shown that there is an exact mapping of a spin-one condensate of fixed particle number with quadratic Zeeman interaction onto a quantum rotor model. Since the rotor model has an unbounded spectrum from above, it has many more eigenstates than the original bosonic model. Here we show that for each subset of states with fixed spin $F_z$, the physical rotor eigenstates are always those with the lowest energy. We classify three distinct physical limits of the rotor model: the Rabi, Josephson, and Fock regimes. The last regime corresponds to a fragmented condensate and is thus not captured by the Bogoliubov theory. We next consider the semiclassical limit of the rotor problem and make connections with the quantum wave functions through the use of the Husimi distribution function. Finally, we describe how to extend the analysis to higher-spin systems and derive a rotor model for the spin-two condensate. Theoretical details of the rotor mapping are also provided here.

We study the ground-state properties of a mixture formed by two spin-1 condensates in the absence of an external magnetic field. As the collisional symmetry between interspecies bosonic atoms is broken, the interspecies coupling interaction ($\beta$) and interspecies singlet-pairing interaction ($\gamma$) arise. The ground state can be calculated using the angular momentum theory analytically for $\gamma =0$. The full quantum approach of exact diagonalization is adopted numerically to consider the more general case as $\gamma \ne 0$. We illustrate the competition between the two interspecies interactions and find that as singlet-pairing interaction dominates (or the total spin vanishes), there are still different types of singlet formations which are well determined by $\beta$.

We present tomographic reconstructions of the magnetic vector potential based on two and three orthogonal tilt series of Lorentz-electron micrographs. Detailed comparisons are made between reconstructions using two and three tilt series, and between direct and filtered-back-projection methods. For reconstructions based on two tilt series, both methods result in similar artifacts due to the existence of singular surfaces. However, these singular surfaces do not exist in reconstructions based on three tilt series, which are significantly more accurate and stable in the presence of noise.