We have studied the optical pumping of mixtures of Rb vapor and ${\mathrm{N}}_2$ buffer gas by laser light tuned to the $D_1$ transition having a spectral width of $~500$ MHz. The Rb densities are of the order of ${10}^{13}$ cm${}^{-3}$, while the buffer-gas pressures range from 0.1 to 10 torr. As the frequency of the right-hand circularly polarized laser is varied across the $D_1$ absorption profile, the electron spin polarization of the Rb is found to take on negative values for small negative values of pump detuning from the absorption profile center. This occurs for ${\mathrm{N}}_2$ pressures below $~1$ torr; at 10 torr the electron spins consistently point in the same direction as the angular momentum of the pump light. The spin-reversal effect can be understood in terms of populations of the $F=2$ (${}^{85}\mathrm{Rb}$) and $F=1$ (${}^{87}\mathrm{Rb}$) states caused by small unpolarized fractions in the pump beam and its elimination in terms of pressure broadening caused by the ${\mathrm{N}}_2$ buffer gas. We speculate that this effect could be used for fast Rb spin modulation.

We investigate the effect of the trapping potential on the quantum phases of strongly correlated ultracold bosons in one-dimensional periodic and quasiperiodic optical lattices. By means of a decoupling meanfield approach, we characterize the ground state of the system and its behavior under variation of the harmonic trapping, as a function of the total number of atoms. For a small atom number the system shows an incompressible Mott-insulating phase, as the size of the cloud remains unaffected when the trapping potential is varied. When the quasiperiodic potential is added the system develops a metastable-disordered phase which is neither compressible nor Mott insulating. This state is characteristic of quasidisorder in the presence of a strong trapping potential.

In a recent work, Y. D. Chong et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 105, 053901 (2010)] proposed the idea of a coherent perfect absorber (CPA) as the time-reversed counterpart of a laser, in which a purely incoming radiation pattern is completely absorbed by a lossy medium. The optical medium that realizes CPA is obtained by reversing the gain with absorption, and thus it generally differs from the lasing medium. Here it is shown that a laser with an optical medium that satisfies the parity-time $(\mathcal{PT})$ symmetry condition $\epsilon (-\mathbf{r})={\epsilon }^{*}(\mathbf{r})$ for the dielectric constant behaves simultaneously as a laser oscillator (i.e., it can emit outgoing coherent waves) and as a CPA (i.e., it can fully absorb incoming coherent waves with appropriate amplitudes and phases). Such a device can thus be referred to as a $\mathcal{PT}$-symmetric CPA laser. The general amplification or absorption features of the $\mathcal{PT}$ CPA laser below lasing threshold driven by two fields are determined.

We have created heralded coherent-state superpositions (CSSs) by subtracting up to three photons from a pulse of squeezed vacuum light. To produce such CSSs at a sufficient rate, we used our high-efficiency photon-number-resolving transition edge sensor to detect the subtracted photons. This experiment is enabled by and utilizes the full photon-number-resolving capabilities of this detector. The CSS produced by three-photon subtraction had a mean-photon number of $2.{75}_{-0.24}^{+0.06}$ and a fidelity of $0.{59}_{-0.14}^{+0.04}$ with an ideal CSS. This confirms that subtracting more photons results in higher-amplitude CSSs.

Experiments that look for nonlinear quantum dynamics test the fundamental premise of physics that one of two separate systems can influence the physical behavior of the other only if there is a force between them, an interaction that involves momentum and energy. The premise is tested because it is the assumption of a proof that quantum dynamics must be linear. Here, variations of a familiar example are used to show how results of nonlinear dynamics in one system can depend on correlations with the other. Effects of one system on the other, influence without interaction between separate systems, not previously considered possible, would be expected with nonlinear quantum dynamics. Whether it is possible or not is subject to experimental tests together with the linearity of quantum dynamics. Concluding comments and questions consider directions our thinking might take in response to this surprising unprecedented situation.

We show that Rabi oscillations of a degenerate fermionic or bosonic gas trapped in a double-well potential can be exploited for the interferometric measurement of external forces at micrometer length scales. The Rabi interferometer is less sensitive but easier to implement than the Mach-Zehnder, since it does not require dynamical beam-splitting or recombination processes. As an application we propose a measurement of the Casimir-Polder force acting between the atoms and a dielectric surface. We find that even if the interferometer is fed with a coherent state of relatively small number of atoms, and in the presence of realistic experimental noise, the force might be measured with a sensitivity sufficient to discriminate between thermal and zero-temperature regimes of the Casimir-Polder potential. Higher sensitivities can be reached with bosonic spin squeezed states.

Recently, it was demonstrated by Son et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 102, 110404 (2009), that a separable bipartite continuous-variable quantum system can violate the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt (CHSH) inequality via operationally local transformations. Operationally local transformations are parametrized only by local variables; however, in order to allow violation of the CHSH inequality, a maximally entangled ancilla was necessary. The use of the entangled ancilla in this scheme caused the state under test to become dependent on the measurement choice one uses to calculate the CHSH inequality, thus violating one of the assumptions used in deriving a Bell inequality, namely, the free will or statistical independence assumption. The novelty in this scheme however is that the measurement settings can be external free parameters. In this paper, we generalize these operationally local transformations for multipartite Bell inequalities (with dichotomic observables) and provide necessary and sufficient conditions for violation within this scheme. Namely, a violation of a multipartite Bell inequality in this setting is contingent on whether an ancillary system admits any realistic local hidden variable model (i.e., whether the ancilla violates the given Bell inequality). These results indicate that violation of a Bell inequality performed on a system does not necessarily imply that the system is nonlocal. In fact, the system under test may be completely classical. However, nonlocality must have resided somewhere, this may have been in the environment, the physical variables used to manipulate the system or the detectors themselves provided the measurement settings are external free variables.

We present a simple model together with its physical implementation which allows one to generate multipartite entanglement between several spatial modes of the electromagnetic field. It is based on parametric down-conversion with $N$ pairs of symmetrically tilted plane waves serving as a pump. The characteristics of this spatial entanglement are investigated in the cases of zero as well as nonzero phase mismatch. Furthermore, the phenomenon of entanglement localization in just two spatial modes is studied in detail and shown to result in an enhancement of the entanglement by a factor $\sqrt{N}$.

A feasible route toward implementing long-distance quantum key distribution (QKD) systems relies on probabilistic schemes for entanglement distribution and swapping as proposed in the work of Duan, Lukin, Cirac, and Zoller (DLCZ) [Nature (London) 414, 413 (2001)]. Here, we calculate the conditional throughput and fidelity of entanglement for DLCZ quantum repeaters by accounting for the DLCZ self-purification property in the presence of multiple excitations in the ensemble memories as well as loss and other sources of inefficiency in the channel and measurement modules. We then use our results to find the generation rate of secure key bits for QKD systems that rely on DLCZ quantum repeaters. We compare the key generation rate per logical memory employed in the two cases with and without a repeater node. We find the crossover distance beyond which the repeater system outperforms the nonrepeater one. That provides us with the optimum internode distancing in quantum repeater systems. We also find the optimal excitation probability at which the QKD rate peaks. Such an optimum probability, in most regimes of interest, is insensitive to the total distance.

We demonstrate experimentally how to remove an arbitrary node from a continuous-variable cluster state and how to shorten any quantum wires of such a state. These two basic operations, performed in an unconditional fashion, are a manifestation of quantum erasure and can be employed to obtain various graph states from an initial cluster state. Starting with a sufficiently large cluster, the resulting graph states can then be used for universal quantum information processing. In the experiment, all variations of this cluster shaping are demonstrated on a four-mode linear cluster state through homodyne measurements and feedforward.

We present a criterion for multiparticle entanglement based on covariance matrices. On the one hand, the criterion allows detection of bound entangled states which are not detected by other criteria; on the other hand, some strongly entangled pure states such as the Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) states are not detected. We show, however, that this is a general phenomenon: No separability criterion based on two-particle correlations can recognize the entanglement in the family of graph states to which the GHZ states belong.

We consider an exact population transition, defined as the probability of finding a state at a final time that is exactly equal to the probability of another state at the initial time. We prove that, given a Hamiltonian, there always exists a complete set of orthogonal states that can be employed as time-zero states for which this exact population transition occurs. The result is general: It holds for arbitrary systems, arbitrary pairs of initial and final states, and for any time interval. The proposition is illustrated with several analytic models. In particular, we demonstrate that in some cases, by tuning the control parameters, a complete transition might occur, where a target state, vacant at $t=0$, is fully populated at time $\tau$.

Using Green’s-function many-body theory, we present the details of a formally exact adiabatic-connection fluctuation-dissipation density-functional theory based on range separation, which was sketched in Toulouse et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 102, 096404 (2009)]. Range-separated density-functional theory approaches combining short-range density-functional approximations with long-range random-phase approximations (RPAs) are then obtained as well-identified approximations on the long-range Green’s-function self-energy. Range-separated RPA-type schemes with or without long-range Hartree-Fock exchange response kernel are assessed on rare-gas and alkaline-earth-metal dimers and compared to range-separated second-order perturbation theory and range-separated coupled-cluster theory.

In search of the discrepancy between theory and experiment in perpendicular plane geometry for ${\mathrm{C}}^{6+}$ ionization of He at 100 MeV/amu, we have used the first and second Born approximations to examine whether ionization to an excited He${}^{+}$ state could be significant, whether relativistic effects could be important, and whether there is substantive sensitivity to the He wave functions used in the calculations. We fail to find any explanation of the discrepancy. Of the three possibilities, only relativistic effects turn out to be significant but then only in changing the overall normalization of the cross section, not in changing its shape, which is a prerequisite to getting agreement with experiment. The second Born calculations are in excellent accord with previous impact parameter coupled pseudostate results [Phys. Rev. A 81, 042704 (2010)] and confirm, yet again, that elastic scattering of the projectile by the target nucleus cannot explain the discrepancy. The calculations are extended to the lower impact energy of 2 MeV/amu. Here, in perpendicular plane geometry, ionization to excited He${}^{+}$ states becomes significant and we find an interesting “oscillatory” structure in both the ground- and excited-state cross sections. Comparison is made with some relative experimental data and, although the agreement is poor, possibly because of the need to include experimental resolutions, there are nuances in the data that mirror the structures in the calculations.

We report the measurements of relative cross sections for single capture (SC), double capture (DC), single ionization (SI), double ionization (DI), and transfer ionization (TI) in collisions of Xe${}^{23+}$ ions with helium atoms in the velocity range of $0.65-1.32$ a.u. The relative cross sections show a weak velocity dependence. The cross-section ratio of double- (DE) to single-electron (SE) removal from He, ${\sigma }_{\mathrm{DE}}/{\sigma }_{\mathrm{SE}}$, is about $0.45$. Single capture is the dominant reaction channel which is followed by transfer ionization, while only very small probabilities are found for pure ionization and double capture. The present experimental data are in satisfactory agreement with the estimations by the extended classical over-barrier (ECB) model.

We present a systematic study of low-energy positron collision with nitrogen molecules. Vibrational elastic and excitation cross sections are calculated using the multichannel version of the continued fractions method in the close-coupling scheme for the positron incident energy up to $20$ eV. The interaction potential is treated within the static-correlation-polarization approximation. The comparison of our calculated data with existing theoretical and experimental results is encouraging.

We analyze the possibility of cooling ions with a single laser beam, due to the coupling between the three components of their motion induced by the Coulomb interaction. For this purpose, we numerically study the dynamics of ion clouds of up to 140 particles, trapped in a linear quadrupole potential and cooled with a laser beam propagating in the radial plane. We use molecular dynamics simulations and model the laser cooling by a stochastic process. For each component of the motion, we systematically study the dependence of the temperature on the anisotropy of the trapping potential. Results obtained using the full radio-frequency (rf) potential are compared to those of the corresponding pseudopotential. In the rf case, the rotation symmetry of the potential has to be broken to keep ions inside the trap. Then, as for the pseudopotential case, we show that the efficiency of the Coulomb coupling to thermalize the components of motion depends on the geometrical configuration of the cloud. Coulomb coupling appears to be not efficient when the ions organize as a line or a pancake and the three components of motion reach the same temperature only if the cloud extends in three dimensions.

This paper reports a theoretical study on the transmission spectra of an arbitrarily polarized laser beam through a rubidium cell with or without a buffer gas in Hanle-type coherent population trapping (CPT). This study examined how laser polarization, transverse magnetic field, and collisions with buffer gas affects the spectrum. The transmission spectrum due to CPT and the absorption spectrum due to the level crossing absorption (LCA) were calculated according to the laser polarization. The results show that the LCA is strongly dependent on the transverse magnetic field and interaction time of the atoms with a laser light via collisions with the buffer gas. In addition, the spectral shape of the calculated Hanle spectrum is closely related to the direction between the (stray) transverse magnetic field and polarization of the laser.

Fundamental solitons pinned to the interface between two discrete lattices coupled at a single site are investigated. Serially and parallel-coupled identical chains (system 1 and system 2), with self-attractive on-site cubic nonlinearity, are considered in one dimension. In these two systems, which can be readily implemented as arrays of nonlinear optical waveguides, symmetric, antisymmetric, and asymmetric solitons are investigated by means of the variational approximation (VA) and numerical methods. The VA demonstrates that the antisymmetric solitons exist in the entire parameter space, while the symmetric and asymmetric modes can be found below some critical value of the coupling parameter. Numerical results confirm these predictions for the symmetric and asymmetric fundamental modes. The existence region of numerically found antisymmetric solitons is also limited by a certain value of the coupling parameter. The symmetric solitons are destabilized via a supercritical symmetry-breaking pitchfork bifurcation, which gives rise to stable asymmetric solitons, in both systems. The antisymmetric fundamental solitons, which may be stable or not, do not undergo any bifurcation. In bistability regions, stable antisymmetric solitons coexist with either symmetric or asymmetric solitons.

Experimental data demonstrate that unlike linear optical processes, an optical Laguerre-Gaussian beam of frequency $\omega$, with topological charge $m$, rotating with angular frequency $\Omega \ll \omega$, may not be considered as a monochromatic beam with the shifted frequency $\omega +m\Omega$ (Doppler angular shift) for the second-harmonic generation nonlinear process.