We calculate the ground-state properties of fermionic dipolar atoms or molecules in a one-dimensional double-tube potential by using the Luttinger liquid theory and the density matrix renormalization-group calculation. When the external field is applied near a magic angle with respect to the double-tube plane, the long-ranged dipolar interaction can generate a spontaneous correlation between fermions in different tubes, even when the bare intertube tunneling rate is negligibly small. Such interaction-induced correlation strongly enhances the contrast of the interference fringes and therefore can be easily observed in the standard time-of-flight experiment.

We examine the phase relationships between different packets of a beam of light emitted from a cavity through a partially transmitting mirror. We find that the beam has a pronounced phase coherence even when the intracavity field has a completely indeterminate phase such as, for example, when it is in a pure photon number state. In this case, the phase coherence can be directly attributed to entanglement caused by the partially transmitting mirror and, even though the external light has phase coherence, it has no identifiable phase. Consequently there is no phase diffusion but there is diffusion of the phase difference between a packet and the intracavity field. Remarkably, we find that the phase coherence of the beam is almost independent of the intracavity state, provided this has a reasonably narrow number-state distribution about a large mean value.

We have computed the spectrum emitted spontaneously by a quantum dot coupled to an arbitrarily detuned single mode cavity, taking into account pure dephasing processes. We show that if the emitter is incoherent, the cavity can efficiently emit photons with its own spectral characteristics. This effect opens unique opportunities for the development of devices exploiting both cavity quantum electrodynamic effects and pure dephasing, such as wavelength-stabilized single-photon sources robust against spectral diffusion.

We propose a method to spatially confine or corral the movements of a micropendulum via the optical forces produced by two simultaneously excited optical modes of a photonic molecule comprising two microspherical cavities. We discuss how the cavity-enhanced optical force generated in the photonic molecule can create an optomechanical potential of about 10 eV deep and 30 pm wide, which can be used to trap the pendulum at any given equilibrium position by a simple choice of laser frequencies. This result presents opportunities for very precise all-optical self-alignment of microsystems.

We experimentally demonstrate pseudothermal ghost imaging and ghost diffraction using only a single detector. We achieve this by replacing the high-resolution detector of the reference beam with a computation of the propagating field, following a recent proposal by Shapiro [ Phys. Rev. A 78, 061802(R) (2008)]. Since only a single detector is used, this provides experimental evidence that pseudothermal ghost imaging does not rely on nonlocal quantum correlations. In addition, we show the depth-resolving capability of this ghost imaging technique.

We suggest a scheme where a laser beam forms an optical trap with a spatial size that is much smaller than the wavelength of light. The key idea is to combine a far-off-resonant dipole trap with a scheme that localizes an atomic excitation.

We propose and demonstrate a scheme to stably generate quadrature-entangled optical pulses using a ring interferometer composed of an optical parametric amplifier and a dispersive media. The entangled light pulses at telecommunication wavelength are generated by combining two squeezed beams. In our scheme, the relative phase between the two beams is kept stable by the ring interferometer and is controllable using dispersive media. The amplitude and phase quadratures of the entangled beams are measured using two time-domain pulsed homodyne detectors. When the relative phase is fixed at $\pi /2$, we verify the inseparability of the states by a sufficient criterion $⟨{\Delta }^2\left[{\widehat{X}}_a\left({\varphi }_0\right)+{\widehat{X}}_b\left(\pi -{\varphi }_0\right)\right]⟩+⟨{\Delta }^2\left[{\widehat{X}}_a\left({\varphi }_0^{\prime }\right)-{\widehat{X}}_b\left(-{\varphi }_0^{\prime }\right)\right]⟩=0.64<1$ where ${\varphi }_0^{\prime }-{\varphi }_0=\pi /2$.

In multidimensional barrier tunneling, there exist different semiclassical mechanisms, i.e., the well-established instanton mechanism and the recently discovered mechanism utilizing complexified stable-unstable manifolds as the guide of tunneling paths. We demonstrate that the transition between the two mechanisms can be observed as a remarkable change in the spectrum of tunneled particles and propose a practical method to evaluate the tunneling rates of the two mechanisms.

We study the use of the quantum wavelet transform to extract efficiently information about the multifractal exponents for multifractal quantum states. We show that, combined with quantum simulation algorithms, it enables to build quantum algorithms for multifractal exponents with a polynomial gain compared to classical simulations. Numerical results indicate that a rough estimate of fractality could be obtained exponentially fast. Our findings are relevant, e.g., for quantum simulations of multifractal quantum maps and of the Anderson model at the metal-insulator transition.

We construct a universal quantum computer following Deutsch’s original proposal of a universal quantum Turing machine (UQTM). Like Deutsch’s UQTM, our machine can emulate any classical Turing machine and can execute any algorithm that can be implemented in the quantum gate array framework but under the control of a quantum program, and hence is universal. We present the architecture of the machine, which consists of a memory tape and a processor and describe the observables that comprise the registers of the processor and the instruction set, which includes a set of operations that can approximate any unitary operation to any desired accuracy and hence is quantum computationally universal. We present the unitary evolution operators that act on the machine to achieve universal computation and discuss each of them in detail and specify and discuss explicit program halting and concatenation schemes. We define and describe a set of primitive programs in order to demonstrate the universal nature of the machine. These primitive programs facilitate the implementation of more complex algorithms and we demonstrate their use by presenting a program that computes the NAND function, thereby also showing that the machine can compute any classically computable function.

We present a quantum repeater protocol that generates the elementary segments of entangled photons through the communication of qubus in coherent states. The input photons at the repeater stations can be in arbitrary states to save the local state preparation time for the operations. The flexibility of the scheme accelerates the generation of the elementary segments (close to the exact Bell states) to a high rate for practical quantum communications. The entanglement connection to long distances is simplified and sped up, possibly realizing an entangled pair of high quality within the time in the order of that for classical communication between two far-away locations.

We present schemes to prepare two-dimensional cluster states [H. J. Briegel and R. Raussendorf, Phys. Rev. Lett. 86, 910 (2001)] with atomic ions confined in a microstructured linear ion trap and coupled by an engineered spin-spin interaction. In particular, we show how to prepare a $n\times 2$ cluster state by creating a linear cluster state and adding third-neighbor entanglement using selective recoupling techniques. The scheme is based on the capabilities provided by segmented linear Paul traps to confine ions in local potential wells and to separate and transport ions between these wells. Furthermore, we consider creating three- and four-qubit cluster states by engineering the coupling matrix such that through the periodicity of the time evolution unwanted couplings are canceled. All entangling operations are achieved by switching of voltages and currents and do not require interaction with laser light.

We report the results of measurements and calculations of differential and integral cross sections for elastic electron scattering from the ${\text{CF}}_2$ molecular radical. The energy range of the present investigation was 2–20 eV, while the angular distributions were measured at specific angles within the scattered electron range $20°–135°$. The calculations employed the Schwinger multichannel method and were carried out both in the static-exchange and static-exchange plus polarization (SEP) approximations, with generally quite good agreement found between the data and the SEP level results. This was particularly true at lower energies, illustrating the importance of correctly accounting for the polarization in these collisions.

The exploration of a quantum control landscape, which is the physical observable as a function of the control variables, is fundamental for understanding the ability to perform observable optimization in the laboratory. For high control variable dimensions, trajectory-based methods provide a means for performing such systematic explorations by exploiting the measured gradient of the observable with respect to the control variables. This paper presents a practical, robust, easily implemented statistical method for obtaining the gradient on a general quantum control landscape in the presence of noise. In order to demonstrate the method’s utility, the experimentally measured gradient is utilized as input in steepest-ascent trajectories on the landscapes of three model quantum control problems: spectrally filtered and integrated second harmonic generation as well as excitation of atomic rubidium. The gradient algorithm achieves efficiency gains of up to approximately three times that of the standard genetic algorithm and, as such, is a promising tool for meeting quantum control optimization goals as well as landscape analyses. The landscape trajectories directed by the gradient should aid in the continued investigation and understanding of controlled quantum phenomena.

We study the stability of Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) with repulsive and attractive interatomic interactions in a harmonic plus quartic trap $\left[V\left(r\right)=\frac{1}{2}m{\omega }^2{r}^2+\lambda r^4\right]$. We find that BEC with repulsive interaction becomes more stable for $\lambda >0$. For $\lambda <0$, we observe a different metastability of the condensate even when the scattering length is positive. For BEC with attractive interaction, we observe dramatic change in the stability factor $\frac{A_{\text{cr}}\left|a_{\text{sc}}\right|}{a_{\text{ho}}}$ due to the anharmonicity. The frequencies of the collective excitations are also modified by the atomic interaction and by the anharmonicity.

We show that quantum-interference phenomena can be realized for the dissipative nonlinear systems exhibiting hysteresis-cycle behavior and quantum chaos. Such results are obtained for a driven dissipative nonlinear oscillator with time-dependent parameters and take place for the regimes of long time intervals exceeding dissipation time and for macroscopic levels of oscillatory excitation numbers. Two schemas of time modulation, (i) periodic variation in the strength of the $\chi \left(3\right)$ nonlinearity; (ii) periodic modulation of the amplitude of the driving force, are considered. These effects are obtained within the framework of phase-space quantum distributions. It is demonstrated that the Wigner functions of oscillatory mode in both bistable and chaotic regimes acquire negative values and interference patterns in parts of phase-space due to appropriately time modulation of the oscillatory nonlinear dynamics. It is also shown that the time modulation of the oscillatory parameters essentially improves the degree of sub-Poissonian statistics of excitation numbers.

We present two ultrastable lasers based on two vibration insensitive cavity designs, one with vertical optical axis geometry, the other horizontal. Ultrastable cavities are constructed with fused silica mirror substrates, shown to decrease the thermal noise limit, in order to improve the frequency stability over previous designs. Vibration sensitivity components measured are equal to or better than $1.5\times {10}^{-11}/\text{m}{\text{s}}^{-2}$ for each spatial direction, which shows significant improvement over previous studies. We have tested the very low dependence on the position of the cavity support points, in order to establish that our designs eliminate the need for fine tuning to achieve extremely low vibration sensitivity. Relative frequency measurements show that at least one of the stabilized lasers has a stability better than $5.6\times {10}^{-16}$ at 1 s, which is the best result obtained for this length of cavity.

Conical diffraction in honeycomb lattices is analyzed. This phenomenon arises in nonlinear Schrödinger equations with honeycomb lattice potentials. In the tight-binding approximation the wave envelope is governed by a nonlinear classical Dirac equation. Numerical simulations show that the Dirac equation and the lattice equation have the same conical diffraction properties. Similar conical diffraction occurs in both the linear and nonlinear regimes. The Dirac system reveals the underlying mechanism for the existence of conical diffraction in honeycomb lattices.

We provide an experimental detailed study of the three-dimensional coherence properties of light speckles produced by different tunable pseudothermal sources. Our findings confirm the theoretical prediction of the companion article [A. Gatti et al., Phys. Rev. A 78, 063806 (2008)], according to which the longitudinal coherence of the speckles is ruled by ordinary diffraction laws only in the deep-Fresnel zone close to the source, deviates from this behavior in the Fresnel zone, and tends to become infinite when approaching the Fraunhofer zone. A quantitative comparison with theory is presented for Gaussian speckles in all the three regimes and for Airy speckles in the deep-Fresnel zone. Potential applications to three-dimensional imaging techniques are briefly discussed.

In this paper we investigate the influence of decoherence effects on quantum states generated as a result of the cross-Kerr nonlinear interaction between two modes. For Markovian losses (both photon loss and dephasing), a region of parameters when losses still do not lead to destruction of nonclassicality is identified. We emphasize the difference in impact of losses in the process of state generation as opposed to those occurring in propagation channel. We show, moreover, that correlated losses in modern realizations of schemes of large cross-Kerr nonlinearity might lead to enhancement of nonclassicality.