The Casimir repulsion between a metal and a dielectric suspended in a liquid has been thoroughly studied in recent experiments. In the present paper we consider surface modes in three layered systems modeled by dielectric functions guaranteeing repulsion. It is shown that surface modes play a decisive role in this phenomenon at short separations. For a toy plasma model we find the contribution of the surface modes at all distances.

The polarizabilities and hyperpolarizabilities of the ${\text{Be}}^{+}$ ion in the $2{}^{2}S$ state and the $2{}^{2}P$ state are determined. Calculations are performed using two independent methods: (i) variationally determined wave functions using Hylleraas basis set expansions and (ii) single electron calculations utilizing a frozen-core Hamiltonian. The first few parameters in the long-range interaction potential between a ${\text{Be}}^{+}$ ion and a H, He, or Li atom, and the leading parameters of the effective potential for the high-$L$ Rydberg states of beryllium were also computed. All the values reported are the results of calculations close to convergence. Comparisons are made with published results where available.

The dynamics of vibrational wave packets in triplet states of rubidium dimers $\left({\text{Rb}}_2\right)$ formed on helium nanodroplets are studied using femtosecond pump-probe photoionization spectroscopy. Due to fast desorption of the excited ${\text{Rb}}_2$ molecules off the droplets and due to their low internal temperature, wave-packet oscillations can be followed up to very long pump-probe delay times $\gtrsim 1.5\text{ns}$. In the first-excited triplet state $\left(1\right){{}^3\Sigma }_g^{+}$, full and fractional revivals are observed with high contrast. Fourier analysis provides high-resolution vibrational spectra which are in excellent agreement with ab initio calculations.

We present a time-dependent density-functional theory approach with proper long-range potential for an ab initio study of the effect of correlated multielectron responses on the multiphoton ionization (MPI) and high-order harmonic generation (HHG) of diatomic molecules ${\text{N}}_2$ and ${\text{F}}_2$ in intense short laser pulse fields with arbitrary molecular orientation. We show that the contributions of inner molecular orbitals to the total MPI probability can be sufficiently large or even dominant over the highest-occupied molecular orbital, depending on detailed electronic structure and symmetry, laser field intensity, and orientation angle. The multielectron effects in HHG are also very important. They are responsible for enhanced HHG at some orientations of the molecular axis. Even strongly bound electrons may have a significant influence on the HHG process.

The sound waves, the stability of Bloch waves, the Bloch oscillation, and the self-trapping phenomenon in interacting two-component Fermi gases throughout the BEC-BCS crossover in one-dimensional (1D), two-dimensional (2D), and three-dimensional (3D) optical lattices are discussed in detail. Within the hydrodynamical theory and by using the perturbative and tight-binding approximation, sound speed in both weak and tight 1D, 2D, 3D optical lattices, and the criteria for occurrences of instability of Bloch waves and self-trapping of Fermi gases along the whole BEC-BCS crossover in tight 1D, 2D, 3D optical lattices are obtained analytically. The results show that the sound speed, the criteria for occurrences of instability of Bloch waves and self-trapping, and the destruction of Bloch oscillation are modified dramatically by the lattice parameters (lattice dimension and lattice strength), the atom density or atom number, and the atom interaction.

We study the dynamics of the atomic and molecular Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) of ${}^{87}\text{R}\text{b}$ in a spherically symmetric trap coupled by stimulated Raman photoassociation process. Considering the higher order nonlinearity in the atom-atom interaction we analyze the dynamics of the system using coupled modified Gross-Pitaevskii (MGP) equations and compare it with mean-field coupled Gross-Pitaevskii (GP) dynamics. Considerable differences in the dynamics are obtained in these two approaches at large scattering length, i.e., for large values of peak-gas parameter $x_{pk}\ge {10}^{-3}$. We show how the dynamics of the coupled system is affected when the atom-molecule and molecule-molecule interactions are considered together with the atom-atom interaction and also when the strengths of these three interactions are increased. The effect of detuning on the efficiency of conversion of atomic fractions into molecules is demonstrated and the feasibility of maximum molecular BEC formation by varying the Raman detuning parameter at different values of time is explored. Thus by varying the Raman detuning and the scattering length for atom-atom interaction one can control the dynamics of the coupled atomic-molecular BEC system. We have also solved coupled Gross-Pitaevskii equations for atomic to molecular condensate formation through magnetic Feshbach resonance in a BEC of ${}^{85}\text{R}\text{b}$. We found similar features for oscillations between atomic and molecular condensates noted in previous theoretical study and obtained fairly good agreement with the evolution of total atomic condensate observed experimentally.

We explore the quantum dynamics of photoassociation of Bose-Einstein condensed atoms into molecules using an optical cavity field. Inside of an optical resonator, photoassociation of quantum degenerate atoms involves the interaction of three coupled quantum fields for the atoms, molecules, and the photons. The feedback created by a high-$Q$ optical cavity causes the cavity field to become a dynamical quantity whose behavior is linked in a nonlinear manner to the atoms inside and where vacuum fluctuations have a more important role than in free space. We develop and compare several methods for calculating the dynamics of the atom-molecule conversion process with a coherently driven cavity field. We first present an alternate operator representation for the Hamiltonian from which we derive an improved form of mean field theory and an approximate solution of the Heisenberg-Langevin (HL) equations that properly accounts for quantum noise in the cavity field. It is shown that our improved mean field theory corrects several deficiencies in traditional mean field theory based on expectation values of annihilation and creation operators. Also, we show by direct comparison to numerical solutions of the density matrix equations that our approximate quantum solution of HL equations gives an accurate description of weakly or undriven cavities where mean field theories break down.

Theoretical analysis to the defect mediated discrete solitons in one- and two-dimensional periodical waveguide lattices is presented. The waveguide arrays with these functional defects are assumed to respond to the light field as an optically induced photorefraction and they are patterned by a holographic technique. It is found that the spatial energy distributions of the solitary waves can be controlled by the defects in the waveguide arrays, and this gives rise to an additional freedom to externally shaping the light field distribution to a special shape.

We investigate the effect of the anisotropy between the $s$-wave scattering lengths of a three-component atomic Fermi gas loaded into a one-dimensional optical lattice. We find four different phases which support trionic instabilities made of bound states of three fermions. These phases distinguish themselves by the relative phases between the $2k_F$ atomic density wave fluctuations of the three species. At small enough densities and strong anisotropies we give further evidences for a decoupling and the stabilization of more conventional BCS phases. Finally, our results are discussed in light of a recent experiment on ${}^6\text{L}\text{i}$ atoms.

We have experimentally demonstrated a high level of control of the mode populations of guided-atom lasers (GALs) by showing that the entropies per particle of an optically GAL and the one of the trapped Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) from which it has been produced are the same. The BEC is prepared in a crossed beam optical dipole trap. We have achieved isentropic outcoupling for both magnetic and optical schemes. We can prepare GAL in a nearly pure monomode regime (85% in the ground state). Furthermore, optical outcoupling enables the production of spinor guided-atom lasers and opens the possibility to tailor their polarization.

It is commonly stated that decoherence in open quantum systems is due to growing entanglement with an environment. In practice, however, surprisingly often decoherence may equally well be described by random unitary dynamics without invoking a quantum environment at all. For a single qubit, for instance, pure decoherence (or phase damping) is always of random unitary type. Here, we construct a simple example of true quantum decoherence of two qubits: we present a feasible phase damping channel of which we show that it cannot be understood in terms of random unitary dynamics. We give a very intuitive geometrical measure for the positive distance of our channel to the convex set of random unitary channels and find remarkable agreement with the so-called Birkhoff defect based on the norm of complete boundedness.

We calculate the critical temperature of the Ising model on a set of graphs representing a concatenated three-bit error-correction code. The graphs are derived from the stabilizer formalism used in quantum error correction. The stabilizer for a subspace is defined as the group of Pauli operators whose eigenvalues are $+1$ on the subspace. The group can be generated by a subset of operators in the stabilizer, and the choice of generators determines the structure of the graph. The Wolff algorithm, together with the histogram method and finite-size scaling, is used to calculate both the critical temperature and the critical exponents of each structure. The simulations show that the choice of stabilizer generators, both the number and the geometry, has a large effect on the critical temperature.

It is shown that entanglement witnesses constructed via the family of spectral conditions are decomposable, i.e., cannot be used to detect bound entanglement. It supports several observations that bound entanglement reveals highly nonspectral features.

We consider an exact state transmission, where a density matrix in one information processor A at time $t=0$ is exactly equal to that in another processor B at a later time. We demonstrate that there always exists a complete set of orthogonal states, which can be employed to perform the exact state transmission. Our result is very general in the sense that it holds for arbitrary media between the two processors and for any time interval. We illustrate our results in terms of models of spin, fermionic, and bosonic chains. This complete set can be used as a basis to study the perfect state transfer which is associated with degenerate subspaces of this set of states. Interestingly, this formalism leads to a proposal of perfect state transfer via adiabatic passage, which does not depend on the specific form of the driving Hamiltonian.

We present a joint theoretical and experimental investigation to demonstrate explicitly how the combined spin-dependent interaction and the configuration interaction may affect the mixing of different spin states along various doubly excited autoionization series for Ca and Sr as energy increases across several ionization thresholds. In particular, our study has identified the inversion of energy levels between members of a number of multiplets, i.e., in contrast to the Hund’s rules, due to the presence of perturber from other overlapping resonance series. We are also able to demonstrate the beginning of the breakdown of the $LS$ coupling for resonance series corresponding to electron configurations with higher orbital angular momenta and those above the third ionization threshold.

Some important features of the graphene physics can be reproduced by loading ultracold fermionic atoms in a two-dimensional optical lattice with honeycomb symmetry and we address here its experimental feasibility. We analyze in great detail the optical lattice generated by the coherent superposition of three coplanar running laser waves with respective angles $2\pi /3$. The corresponding band structure displays Dirac cones located at the corners of the Brillouin zone and close to half-filling this system is well described by massless Dirac fermions. We characterize their properties by accurately deriving the nearest-neighbor hopping parameter $t_0$ as a function of the optical lattice parameters. Our semiclassical instanton method proves in excellent agreement with an exact numerical diagonalization of the full Hamilton operator in the tight-binding regime. We conclude that the temperature range needed to access the Dirac fermions regime is within experimental reach. We also analyze imperfections in the laser configuration as they lead to optical lattice distortions which affect the Dirac fermions. We show that the Dirac cones do survive up to some critical intensity or angle mismatches which are easily controlled in actual experiments. In the tight-binding regime, we predict, and numerically confirm, that these critical mismatches are inversely proportional to the square root of the optical potential strength. We also briefly discuss the interesting possibility of fine tuning the mass of the Dirac fermions by controlling the laser phase in an optical lattice generated by the incoherent superposition of three coplanar independent standing waves with respective angles $2\pi /3$.

We study sound propagation in a uniform superfluid gas of Fermi atoms in the unitary limit. The existence of normal and superfluid components leads to appearance of two sound modes in the collisional regime, referred to as first and second sounds. The second sound is of particular interest as it is a clear signal of a superfluid component. Using Landau’s two-fluid hydrodynamic theory, we calculate hydrodynamic sound velocities and these weights in the density response function. The latter is used to calculate the response to a sudden modification of the external potential generating pulse propagation. The amplitude of a pulse which is proportional to the weight in the response function is calculated, the basis of the approach of Nozières and Schmitt-Rink for the BCS-BEC. We show that, in a superfluid Fermi gas at unitarity, the second-sound pulse is excited with an appreciate amplitude by density perturbations.

We report our findings on the quantum phase transitions in cold bosonic atoms in a one-dimensional optical lattice using the finite-size density-matrix renormalization-group method in the framework of the extended Bose-Hubbard model. We consider wide ranges of values for the filling factors and the nearest-neighbor interactions. At commensurate fillings, we obtain two different types of charge-density wave phases and a Mott insulator phase. However, departure from commensurate fillings yields the exotic supersolid phase where both the crystalline and the superfluid orders coexist. In addition, we obtain the signatures for the solitary waves and the superfluid phase.

We study quadrupole collective oscillations in the bose-fermi mixtures of ultracold atomic gases of Yb isotopes, which are realized by Kyoto group. Three kinds of combinations are chosen, ${}^{170}\text{Y}\text{b-}{}^{171}\text{Y}\text{b}$, ${}^{170}\text{Y}\text{b-}{}^{173}\text{Y}\text{b}$ and ${}^{174}\text{Y}\text{b-}{}^{173}\text{Y}\text{b}$, where boson-fermion interactions are weakly repulsive, strongly attractive and strongly repulsive respectively. Collective oscillations in these mixtures are calculated in a dynamical time-evolution approach with the time-dependent Gross-Pitaevskii and the Vlasov equations. The boson oscillations are shown to have one collective mode, and the fermions are shown to have the boson-forced and two intrinsic modes, which correspond to the inside- and outside-fermion oscillations for the boson-distributed regions. The oscillations obtained in the dynamical approach show discrepancies from the results obtained in the small-amplitude approximations, e.g., the random phase approximation, except in the case of weak boson-fermion interactions. We also analyze these discrepancies, and show that they originated in the change of the fermion distributions through oscillation.

Scattering in one dimension of an attractive ultracold bosonic cloud from a barrier can lead to the formation of two nonoverlapping clouds. Once formed, the clouds travel with constant velocity, in general different in magnitude from that of the incoming cloud, and do not disperse. The phenomenon and its mechanism—transformation of kinetic energy to internal energy of the scattered cloud—are obtained by solving the time-dependent many-boson Schrödinger equation. The analysis of the wave function shows that the object formed corresponds to a quantum superposition state of two distinct wave packets traveling through real space.