We show that molecular orientation can be controlled by sequential three-photon Raman excitations with time-delayed dual-color ultrashort laser pulses. The field-free molecular orientation created by a dual-color ultrashort laser pulse can be significantly enhanced or completely suppressed when another in-phase or antiphase dual-color ultrashort laser pulse is applied at its full revival time. By applying the second dual-color ultrashort laser pulse at the half-revival time, the odd and even rotational wave packets for the impulsive molecular orientation can be promoted and depressed by changing its carrier-envelope phase.

The rate of ionization of an atom of helium, argon, or hydrogen exposed to an intense monochromatic laser field and the quasienergy spectrum of their dressed states are studied for values of the Keldysh parameter between 1 and 0.6 and wavelengths between 390 and 1300 nm. The calculations are carried out within the non-Hermitian Floquet theory. Resonances with intermediate excited states significantly affect ionization from the dressed ground state at all the intensities and all the wavelengths considered. The dressed excited states responsible for these structures are large-${\alpha }_0$ states akin to the Kramers-Henneberger states of the high-frequency Floquet theory. Within the single-active-electron approximation, these large-${\alpha }_0$ states become species independent at sufficiently high intensity or sufficiently long wavelength. Apart for the resonance structures arising from multiphoton coupling with excited states, the ab initio Floquet ionization rate is in excellent agreement with the predictions of two different calculations in the strong field approximation, one based on a length-gauge formulation of this approximation and one based on a velocity-gauge formulation. The calculations also confirm the validity of the ${\omega }^2$ expansion as an alternative to the strong field approximation for taking into account the nonadiabaticity of the ionization process in intense low-frequency laser fields.

At subwavelength distance from the exit surface of a disordered medium, speckle patterns generated by multiple scattering of waves exhibit nonuniversal near-field correlations. A calculation of the field spatial correlation function shows that the correlation length is driven by the microscopic structure of the medium. The averaged speckle spot size can be smaller than the wavelength, even for nonresonant dielectric media.

I investigate the properties of spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC) involving collinear Gaussian spatial modes for the pump and the photon collection optics. Approximate analytical and numerical results are obtained for the peak spectral density, photon bandwidth, pair collection probability, heralding ratio, and spectral purity as a function of crystal length and beam-focusing parameters. I address the optimization of these properties individually as well as jointly, and find focusing conditions that simultaneously bring the pair collection probability, heralding ratio, and spectral purity to near-optimal values. These properties are also found to be nearly scale invariant, that is, ultimately independent of crystal length. The results obtained here are expected to be useful for designing SPDC sources with high performance in multiple categories for the next generation of SPDC applications.

A unitary transformation approach is used to study the energy level shift of the atom coupled to both a vacuum electromagnetic field and a driving laser. The Lamb shift of the energy levels is shown to depend on the Rabi frequency and the detuning of the driving laser, which couples another pair of levels.

We report on experiments dealing with feedback-controlled pulse shaping to optimize the efficiency of light storage by electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) in a Pr${}^{3+}$:Y${}_2$SiO${}_5$ crystal. A learning loop in combination with an evolutionary algorithm permits the automatic determination of optimal temporal profiles of intensities and frequencies in the driving laser pulses (i.e., the probe and coupling pulses). As a main advantage, the technique finds optimal solutions even in the complicated multilevel excitation scheme of a doped solid, involving large inhomogeneous broadening. The learning loop experimentally determines optimal temporal intensity profiles of the coupling pulses for a given probe pulse. The optimized intensity pulse shapes enhance the light-storage efficiency in the doped solid by a factor of $2$. The learning loop also determines a fast and efficient preparation pulse sequence, which serves to optically prepare the crystal prior to light-storage experiments. The optimized preparation sequence is 5 times faster than standard preparation sequences. Moreover, the optimized preparation sequence enhances the optical depth in the medium by a factor of $5$. As a consequence, the efficiency of light storage also increases by another factor of $3$. Our experimental data clearly demonstrate the considerable potential of feedback-controlled pulse shaping, applied to EIT-driven light storage in solid media.

We consider the continuous-wave (cw) propagation through a fiber Bragg grating that is uniformly doped with two-level resonant atoms. Wave propagation is governed by a system of nonlinear coupled-mode Maxwell-Bloch (NLCM-MB) equations. We identify modulational instability (MI) conditions required for the generation of ultrashort pulses in both anomalous and normal dispersion regimes. From a detailed linear stability analysis, we find that the atomic detuning frequency has a strong influence on the MI. That is, the atomic detuning frequency induces nonconventional MI sidebands at the photonic band gap (PBG) edges and near the PBG edges. Especially in the normal dispersion regime, MI occurs without any threshold condition, which is in contrast with that of conventional fiber Bragg gratings. We also perform a numerical analysis to solve the NLCM-MB equations. The numerical results of the prediction of both the optimum modulation wave number and the optimum gain agree well with that of the linear stability analysis. Another main result of the present work is the prediction of the existence of both bright and dark self-induced transparency gap solitons at the PBG edges.

We present a geometric optics theory for the transport of quantum particles (or classical waves) in a chiral and dissipative periodic crystal subject to slowly varying perturbations in space and time. Taking account of some properties of particles and media neglected in previous theory, we find important additional terms in the equations of motion of particles. The (energy) current density field, which traces the geometric optics rays, is not only governed by the Bloch band energy dispersion but also involves there additional fields. These are the angular momentum of the particle, the dissipation dipole density, and various geometric gauge fields in the extended phase space spanned by space time and its reciprocal, momentum, and frequency. For simplicity, the theory is presented using light propagation in photonic crystals.

We use nuclear magnetic resonance to experimentally generate a bound-entangled (more precisely: pseudo-bound-entangled) state, i.e., a quantum state which is nondistillable but nevertheless entangled. Our quantum system consists of three qubits. We characterize the produced state via state tomography to show that the created state has a positive partial transposition with respect to any bipartite splitting, and we use a witness operator to prove its pseudoentanglement.

Overlap with the separable state is introduced in this article for the purpose of characterizing the overall correlation in many-body systems. This definition has clear geometric and physical meaning and moreover can be considered as the generalization of the concept of the Anderson orthogonality catastrophe. As an exemplification, it is used to mark the phase transition in the Dicke model for zero and finite temperatures, and the discussion shows that it can faithfully reflect the phase transition properties of this model whether for zero or finite temperature. Furthermore, the overlap for the ground state also indicates the appearance of multipartite entanglement in the Dicke model.

The influence of the geometric phase on a Bell measurement, as proposed by Bertlmann et al. [Phys. Rev. A 69, 032112 (2004)] and expressed by the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt (CHSH) inequality, has been observed for a spin-path-entangled neutron state in an interferometric setup. It is experimentally demonstrated that the effect of geometric phase can be balanced by a change in Bell angles. The geometric phase is acquired during a time-dependent interaction with a radiofrequency field. Two schemes, polar and azimuthal adjustment of the Bell angles, are realized and analyzed in detail. The former scheme yields a sinusoidal oscillation of the correlation function $S$, dependent on the geometric phase, such that it varies in the range between $2$ and $2\sqrt{2}$ and therefore always exceeds the boundary value $2$ between quantum mechanic and noncontextual theories. The latter scheme results in a constant, maximal violation of the Bell-like CHSH inequality, where $S$ remains $2\sqrt{2}$ for all settings of the geometric phase.

We describe the spin and momentum degrees of freedom of a system of two massive spin-$\frac{1}{2}$ particles as a four-qubit system. Then we explicitly show how the entanglement changes between different partitions of the qubits, when considered by different inertial observers. Although the two particle entanglement corresponding to a partition into Alice’s and Bob’s subsystems is, as often stated in the literature, invariant under Lorentz boosts, the entanglement with respect to other partitions of the Hilbert space on the other hand, is not. It certainly does depend on the chosen inertial frame and on the initial state considered. The change of entanglement arises, because a Lorentz boost on the momenta of the particles causes a Wigner rotation of the spin, which in certain cases entangles the spin with the momentum states. We systematically investigate the situation for different classes of initial spin states and different partitions of the four-qubit space. Furthermore, we study the behavior of Bell inequalities for different observers and demonstrate how the maximally possible degree of violation, using the Pauli-Lubanski spin observable, can be recovered by any inertial observer.

We consider tunneling of a nonrelativistic particle across a potential barrier. It is shown that the barrier acts as an effective beam splitter which builds up the transmitted pulse from the copies of the initial envelope shifted in the coordinate space backward relative to the free propagation. Although along each pathway causality is explicitly obeyed, in special cases reshaping can result an overall reduction of the initial envelope, accompanied by an arbitrary coordinate shift. In the case of a high barrier the delay amplitude distribution (DAD) mimics a Dirac $\delta$ function, the transmission amplitude is superoscillatory for finite momenta and tunneling leads to an accurate advancement of the (reduced) initial envelope by the barrier width. In the case of a wide barrier, initial envelope is accurately translated into the complex coordinate plane. The complex shift, given by the first moment of the DAD, accounts for both the displacement of the maximum of the transmitted probability density and the increase in its velocity. It is argued that analyzing apparent “superluminality” in terms of spacial displacements helps avoid contradiction associated with time parameters such as the phase time.

In this article, we systematically study the spontaneous decay phenomenon of a two-level system under the influences of both its environment and repetitive measurements. In order to clarify some well-established conclusions about the quantum Zeno effect (QZE) and the quantum anti-Zeno effect (QAZE), we do not use the rotating wave approximation (RWA) in obtaining an effective Hamiltonian. We examine various spectral distributions by making use of our present approach in comparison with other approaches. It is found that with respect to a bare excited state even without the RWA, the QAZE can still happen for some cases, for example, the interacting spectra of hydrogen. However, for a physical excited state, which is a renormalized dressed state of the atomic state, the QAZE disappears and only the QZE remains. These discoveries inevitably show a transition from the QZE to the QAZE as the measurement interval changes.

A proof that continuous-time quantum walks are universal for quantum computation, using unweighted graphs of low degree, has recently been presented by A. M. Childs [Phys. Rev. Lett. 102, 180501 (2009)]. We present a version based instead on the discrete-time quantum walk. We show that the discrete-time quantum walk is able to implement the same universal gate set and thus both discrete and continuous-time quantum walks are computational primitives. Additionally, we give a set of components on which the discrete-time quantum walk provides perfect state transfer.

When an off-resonant light field is coupled with atomic spins, its polarization can rotate depending on the direction of the spins via Faraday rotation, which has been used for monitoring and controlling the atomic spins. We observed Faraday rotation by an angle of more than 10 deg for a single nuclear spin of 1/2 of a ${}^{171}\mathrm{Yb}$ atom in a high-finesse optical cavity. By employing the coupling between the single nuclear spin and a photon, we have also demonstrated that the spin can be projected or weakly measured through the projection of the transmitted single ancillary photon.

We present an efficient quantum entanglement distribution over an arbitrary collective-noise channel. The basic idea in the present scheme is that two parties in quantum communication first transmit the entangled states in the frequency degree of freedom which suffers little from the noise in an optical fiber. After the two parties share the photon pairs, they add some operations and equipments to transfer the frequency entanglement of pairs into the polarization entanglement with the success probability of $100\%$. Finally, they can get maximally entangled polarization states with polarization independent wavelength division multiplexers and quantum frequency up-conversion which can erase distinguishability for frequency. Compared with conventional entanglement purification protocols, the present scheme works in a deterministic way in principle. Surprisingly, the collective noise leads to an additional advantage.

We show how to protect a stream of quantum information from decoherence induced by a noisy quantum communication channel. We exploit preshared entanglement and a convolutional coding structure to develop a theory of entanglement-assisted quantum convolutional coding. Our construction produces a Calderbank-Shor-Steane (CSS) entanglement-assisted quantum convolutional code from two arbitrary classical binary convolutional codes. The rate and error-correcting properties of the classical convolutional codes directly determine the corresponding properties of the resulting entanglement-assisted quantum convolutional code. We explain how to encode our CSS entanglement-assisted quantum convolutional codes starting from a stream of information qubits, ancilla qubits, and shared entangled bits.

We extend our prior work on the construction of variational wave functions $\psi$ that are functionals of functions $\chi :\psi =\psi [\chi ]$ rather than simply being functions. In this manner, the space of variations is expanded over those of traditional variational wave functions. In this article we perform the constrained search over the functions $\chi$ chosen such that the functional $\psi [\chi ]$ satisfies simultaneously the constraints of normalization and the exact expectation value of an arbitrary single- or two-particle Hermitian operator, while also leading to a rigorous upper bound to the energy. As such the wave function functional is accurate not only in the region of space in which the principal contributions to the energy arise but also in the other region of the space represented by the Hermitian operator. To demonstrate the efficacy of these ideas, we apply such a constrained search to the ground state of the negative ion of atomic hydrogen ${\mathrm{H}}^{-}$, the helium atom He, and its positive ions Li${}^{+}$ and Be${}^{2+}$. The operators $W$ whose expectations are obtained exactly are the sum of the single-particle operators $W={\sum }_i{r}_i^n,n=-2,-1,1,2$, $W={\sum }_i\delta ({\mathbf{r}}_i)$, $W=-\frac{1}{2}{\sum }_i{\nabla }_i^2$, and the two-particle operators $W={\sum }_n{u}^n,n=-2,-1,1,2$, where $u=|{\mathbf{r}}_i-{\mathbf{r}}_j|$. Comparisons with the method of Lagrangian multipliers and of other constructions of wave-function functionals are made. Finally, we present further insights into the construction of wave-function functionals by studying a previously proposed construction of functionals $\psi [\chi ]$ that lead to the exact expectation of arbitrary Hermitian operators. We discover that analogous to the solutions of the Schrödinger equation, there exist $\psi [\chi ]$ that are unphysical in that they lead to singular values for the expectations. We also explain the origin of the singularity.

The key questions of uniqueness and existence in time-dependent density-functional theory are usually formulated only for potentials and densities that are analytic in time. Simple examples, standard in quantum mechanics, lead, however, to nonanalyticities. We reformulate these questions in terms of a nonlinear Schrödinger equation with a potential that depends nonlocally on the wave function.