We report on pulse evolution without wave breaking in a strongly dissipative-dispersive laser system where pulses encounter significant amounts of positive and negative dispersions. In contrast to conventional soliton, dispersion-managed soliton, and self-similar pulse evolutions, a different type of pulse shaping in mode-locked lasers is theoretically investigated and experimentally observed. The pulses of this laser have very low frequency chirp and exhibit as the quasirectangle temporal and Gaussian spectral profiles, and the spectral width is almost independent of the pumping strength. The temporal and spectral widths fluctuate as low as $~3\%$ of the relative fluctuation throughout the laser cavity. Both numerical and experimental results show that the pulses exist with energies much greater than can be tolerated in self-similar pulse shaping.

We study the time evolution of a superposition of product states of two dressed atoms in a spherical cavity in the situations of an arbitrarily large cavity (free space) and a small one. In the large-cavity case, the system dissipates, whereas, for the small cavity, the system evolves in an oscillating way and never completely decays. We verify that the von Neumann entropy for such a system does depends neither on time nor the size of the cavity.

We study the conditions for probing the environment affecting an inaccessible system by means of continuous interaction and measurements performed only on a probe. The scheme exploits the statistical properties of the probe at its steady state and simple data postprocessing. Our results, highlighting the roles played by interaction and entanglement in this process, are both pragmatically relevant and fundamentally interesting.

A rigorous quantum theory of atomic collisions in the presence of radio frequency (rf) magnetic fields is developed and applied to elucidate the effects of combined dc and rf magnetic fields on ultracold collisions of Rb atoms. We show that rf fields can be used to induce Feshbach resonances, which can be tuned by varying the amplitude and frequency of the rf field. The rf-induced Feshbach resonances occur also in collisions of atoms in low-field-seeking states at moderate rf field strengths easily available in atom chip experiments, which opens up the world of tunable interactions to magnetically trappable atomic quantum gases.

We study the single-particle spectral function of resonantly interacting fermions in the unitary regime, as described by the three-dimensional attractive Hubbard model in the dilute limit. Our approach, based on the dynamical cluster approximation and the maximum entropy method, shows the emergence of a gap with decreasing temperature, as reported in recent cold-atom photoemission experiments, for coupling values that span the BEC-BCS crossover. By comparing the behavior of the spectral function to that of the imaginary time dynamical pairing susceptibility, we attribute the development of the gap to the formation of local bound atom pairs.

We demonstrate analytically and numerically that stable spatial similaritons can be supported by homogeneous conservative optical media with quintic nonlinearities. Unlike previously discussed spatial similaritons, the novel waves may exist in a broad parameter regime. We also present a generic model for a quintic nonlinearity by considering a centrosymmetric nonlinear medium doped with resonant impurities in the limit of a large light carrier frequency detuning from the impurity resonance.

We evaluate the quantum discord dynamics of two qubits in independent and common non-Markovian environments. We compare the dynamics of entanglement with that of quantum discord. For independent reservoirs the quantum discord vanishes only at discrete instants whereas the entanglement can disappear during a finite time interval. For a common reservoir, quantum discord and entanglement can behave very differently with sudden birth of the former but not of the latter. Furthermore, in this case the quantum discord dynamics presents sudden changes in the derivative of its time evolution which is evidenced by the presence of kinks in its behavior at discrete instants of time.

We propose a scheme for realizing quantum repeaters with Rydberg-blockade-coupled atomic ensembles, based on a recently proposed collective encoding strategy. Rydberg-blockade-mediated two-qubit gates and efficient cooperative photon emission are employed to create ensemble-photon entanglement. Thanks to deterministic entanglement swapping operations via Rydberg-based two-qubit gates, and to the suppression of multiexcitation errors by the blockade effect, the entanglement distribution rate of the present scheme is higher by orders of magnitude than the rates achieved by other ensemble-based repeaters. We also show how to realize temporal multiplexing with this system, which offers an additional speedup in entanglement distribution.

We analyze the quantum phases of multicomponent Bose-Hubbard models in optical superlattices based on a mean-field method, that is, the decoupling approximation. The global phase diagrams exhibit complex patterns with various charge-density-wave orders for both one- and two-component cases. We further calculate the effective spin excitations for the two-component case in the strong-coupling region at unit filling, and show the existence of a spin-density-wave order. The results of our study can be tested straightforwardly with current cold-atom experimental techniques.

Decoherence phenomenona in a neutron interferometer are analyzed by simulation of the effects of an environment with magnetic noise fields. Basic calculations and experiments show the validity and limitations of this model system. In particular, loss and recovery of the interference pattern with controllable noise sources in both interferometer arms are discussed in detail. In addition, the decoherence behavior at high interference order, where Schrödinger-cat-like states exist in the interferometer, is investigated. While at low interference order a smearing of the interference pattern is observed, at high interference order a smearing of the modulated momentum distribution occurs.

The viscosity of strongly interacting systems is a topic of great interest in diverse fields. We focus here on the bulk and shear viscosities of nonrelativistic quantum fluids, with particular emphasis on strongly interacting ultracold Fermi gases. We use Kubo formulas for the bulk and shear viscosity spectral functions, $\zeta (\omega )$ and $\eta (\omega )$, respectively, to derive exact, nonperturbative results. Our results include a microscopic connection between the shear viscosity $\eta$ and the normal-fluid density ${\rho }_n$; sum rules for $\zeta (\omega )$ and $\eta (\omega )$ and their evolution through the BCS-BEC crossover (where BEC denotes Bose-Einstein condensate); and universal high-frequency tails for $\eta (\omega )$ and the dynamic structure factor $S(\mathbf{q},\omega )$. We use our sum rules to show that, at unitarity, $\zeta (\omega )$ is identically zero and thus relate $\eta (\omega )$ to density-density correlations. We predict that frequency-dependent shear viscosity $\eta (\omega )$ of the unitary Fermi gas can be experimentally measured using Bragg spectroscopy.

The output pulses of a commercial high-power femtosecond fiber laser or amplifier are typically around 300–500 fs with wavelengths of approximately 1030 nm and tens of microjoules of pulse energy. Here, we present a numerical study of cascaded quadratic soliton compression of such pulses in ${\mathrm{LiNbO}}_3$ using second-harmonic generation in a type-I phase-matching configuration. We find that because of competing cubic material nonlinearities, compression can only occur in the nonstationary regime, where group-velocity-mismatch–induced Raman-like nonlocal effects prevent compression to less than 100 fs. However, the strong group-velocity dispersion implies that the pulses can achieve moderate compression to durations of less than 130 fs in available crystal lengths. Most of the pulse energy is conserved because the compression is moderate. The effects of diffraction and spatial walk-off are addressed, and in particular the latter could become an issue when compressing such long crystals (around 10 cm long). We finally show that the second harmonic contains a short pulse locked to the pump and a long multi-picosecond red-shifted detrimental component. The latter is caused by the nonlocal effects in the nonstationary regime, but because it is strongly red-shifted to a position that can be predicted, we show that it can be removed using a bandpass filter, leaving a visible component of less than 100 fs at $\lambda =515$ nm with excellent pulse quality.

We study the photon counting noise in optical interferometers used for gravitational wave detection. In order to reduce quantum noise, a squeezed vacuum is injected into the usually unused input port. It is investigated under which conditions the gravitational wave signal may be amplified without increasing counting noise concurrently. Such a possibility was suggested as a consequence of the entanglement of the two output ports of a beam splitter. We find that amplification without concurrent increase of noise is not possible for reasonable squeezing parameters. Photon distributions for various beam splitter angles and squeezing parameters are calculated.

We introduce a waveguide array model with alternating positive and negative couplings between adjacent waveguides. Two different settings where such a model can be realized are identified as arrays of defects in Bragg gratings and arrays with propagation constants that periodically vary along the propagation direction. We analyze the properties of wave propagation in such waveguide arrays and find several interesting properties that have no counterpart in the case of arrays with constant couplings. These include the beam self-splitting, self-induced Talbot oscillations, symmetric evolution of Bloch oscillations, and new families of lattice solitons.

We study light scattering by spherical nanoshells consisting of metal-dielectric composites. We consider several geometries of nanoshell particles with dielectric and metallic cores. We demonstrate that in all studied cases the local field enhancement takes place in out-of-resonance regions (“dark states”), which nevertheless can be understood in terms of the Fano resonance. At optimal conditions the light is mostly localized inside the dielectric material and the enhancement factor up to four orders of magnitude is achieved for subwavelength coating. Using nonlinear dielectric materials will lead to a variety of nonlinear phenomena applicable for photonics applications.

A decelerator is presented where polar neutral molecules are guided and decelerated using the principle of traveling electric potential wells, such that molecules are confined in stable three-dimensional traps throughout. We compare this decelerator with that of Scharfenberg et al. [Phys. Rev. A 79, 023410 (2009)] and we show that the current decelerator provides a substantially larger phase-space acceptance, even at higher acceleration. The mode of operation is described and experimentally demonstrated by guiding and decelerating CO molecules.

We derive an exact non-Markovian master equation that generalizes the previous work [Hu, Paz and Zhang, Phys. Rev. D 45, 2843 (1992)] to damped harmonic oscillators with time-varying parameters. This is achieved by exploiting the linearity of the system and operator solution in Heisenberg picture. Our equation governs the non-Markovian quantum dynamics when the system is modulated by external devices. As an application, we apply our equation to parity kick decoupling problems. The time-dependent dissipative coefficients in the master equation are shown to be modified drastically when the system is driven by $\pi$ pulses. For coherence protection to be effective, our numerical results indicate that kicking period should be shorter than memory time of the bath. The effects of using soft pulses in an ohmic bath are also discussed.

We experimentally demonstrate that the nonlocal nature of time-bin entangled photonic qubits persists when one or two qubits of the pair are converted to polarization qubits. This is possible by implementing a universal time-bin qubit analyzer (UTBA), which allows the analysis of time-bin qubits in any basis. We reveal the nonlocal nature of the emitted light by violating the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt inequality with measurement bases exploring all the dimensions of the Bloch sphere. Moreover, we conduct experiments where one qubit is transmitted over a 12.4 km underground fiber link and demonstrate the suitability of our scheme for use in a real-world setting. The resulting entanglement can also be interpreted as hybrid entanglement between different types of degrees of freedom of two physical systems, which could prove useful in large-scale, heterogeneous quantum networks. This work opens possibilities for testing nonlocality and for implementing new quantum communication protocols with time-bin entanglement.