This paper establishes single-letter formulas for the exact entanglement cost of simulating quantum channels under free quantum operations that completely preserve positivity of the partial transpose (PPT). First, we introduce the $\kappa$-entanglement measure for point-to-point quantum channels, based on the idea of the $\kappa$ entanglement of bipartite states, and we establish several fundamental properties for it, including amortization collapse, monotonicity under PPT superchannels, additivity, normalization, faithfulness, and nonconvexity. Second, we introduce and solve the exact entanglement cost for simulating quantum channels in both the parallel and sequential settings, along with the assistance of free PPT-preserving operations. In particular, we establish that the entanglement cost in both cases is given by the same single-letter formula, the $\kappa$-entanglement measure of a quantum channel. We further show that this cost is equal to the largest $\kappa$ entanglement that can be shared or generated by the sender and receiver of the channel. This formula is calculable by a semidefinite program, thus allowing for an efficiently computable solution for general quantum channels. Noting that the sequential regime is more powerful than the parallel regime, another notable implication of our result is that both regimes have the same power for exact quantum channel simulation, when PPT superchannels are free. For several basic Gaussian quantum channels, we show that the exact entanglement cost is given by the Holevo-Werner formula [Holevo and Werner, Phys. Rev. A 63, 032312 (2001)], giving an operational meaning of the Holevo-Werner quantity for these channels.

The application of unsupervised machine learning to the study of physical problems is an emerging field aimed at leveraging their outstanding capabilities to distill essential information from complex data sets. Here we use Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), deep learning algorithms mainly used to synthesize realistic images, for the analysis of a physical problem: the propagation of interacting quantum particles on disordered chains, characterized by the emergence of complex quantum correlations. We find that GANs can learn these correlations and identify the physical control parameters in a completely unsupervised manner. After training on a data set of unlabeled examples, the algorithm can generate, without further calculations, a much larger number of unseen yet physically correct new instances. Most notably, the knowledge distilled in the algorithm's latent space identifies the relevant control parameter, the level of disorder in our case, even though this was not highlighted in the training set. This allows tuning the disorder level in the generated samples to values the algorithm was not explicitly trained on, thereby uncovering a fundamental physical phenomenon—the crossover from nearly free propagation to localization. These results demonstrate the ability of deep neural networks to learn and generalize physical rules by scanning examples and suggest their use in physical analysis and discovery.

On-demand and efficient storage of photons is an essential element in quantum information processing and long-distance quantum communication. Most of the quantum memory protocols require bulk systems in order to store photons. However, with the advent of integrated photonic chip platforms for quantum information processing, on-chip quantum memories are highly sought after. In this paper, we propose a protocol for multimode photonic quantum memory using only a single-atom-cavity setup. We show that a single atom containing a frequency comb coupled to an optical cavity can store photons efficiently. Further, this scheme can also be used to store polarization states of light. As examples, we show that rubidium and cesium atoms coupled to nanophotonic waveguide cavities can serve as promising candidates to realize our scheme. This provides the possibility of a robust and efficient on-chip quantum memory to be used in integrated photonic chips.

The structure and photoexcitation dynamics of high-lying doubly excited states of the strontium atom with high angular momenta are studied in the vicinity of the ${\mathrm{Sr}}^{+}(N=5)$ threshold. The spectra recorded using resonant multiphoton isolated-core excitation are analyzed with calculations based on configuration interaction with exterior complex scaling, which treats the correlated motion of the two valence electrons of Sr from first principles. The results are rationalized with a model based on multichannel quantum-defect theory and transition dipole moments calculated with a perturbative treatment of electron correlations. Together, both approaches reveal that most of the lines observed in the spectra arise from the interaction of a single optically active state, coupled to the initial state by an electric-dipole transition, with entire doubly excited Rydberg series. The long-range electron correlations responsible for this interaction unexpectedly vanish for identical values of the initial and final principal quantum numbers, a fact related to the quasihydrogenic nature of the high-$l$ Rydberg electron. This special situation, and, in particular, the vanishing interaction, leads to the surprising observation of an electric-quadrupole isolated-core excitation with a similar intensity to that of the neighboring electric-dipole transitions.

We theoretically and numerically investigate the properties of waveguides based on the Pancharatnam-Berry phase, obtained by a longitudinally periodic rotation of the optic axis in a transversely twisted birefringent medium. In this paper we study the case where the period of the longitudinal modulation is chosen so that a net accumulation of geometric phase in propagation occurs. First, the interplay between different contributions to the optical potential is addressed. Second, a continuous evolution of the polarization structure of the quasimodes is observed in the numerical simulations. We explain it by a combination of plane-wave-based models and gauge transformations. We discover that, beyond the longitudinal oscillations, the polarization of the quasimode also varies through its cross section. The analogies with respect to charged particles moving in a magnetic field are outlined.

We study electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) using quantized fields in a dissipative optomechanical system with two mechanical oscillators coupled to each other via the Coulomb interaction. The weak probe field is a finite bandwidth squeezed vacuum field. In the absence of the Coulomb coupling, we show that an EIT dip is observable in the homodyne spectrum of the output field even for the squeezed vacuum field at the single-photon level. We find that the thermal environment has a negative impact on the EIT behavior. In the presence of the Coulomb coupling, we show that double EIT dips appear in the homodyne spectrum of the output field. The separation between the two EIT dips can be used to measure the Coulomb coupling strength. Compared to the case of the purely dissipative coupling, the combined dispersive and dissipative coupling can make the EIT dip broader and the minimum value of the EIT dip smaller.

Atomic superfluids confined in a ring provide a remarkable paradigm for quantized circulation. Very recently, a technique based on cavity optomechanics has been proposed [Kumar et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 127, 113601 (2021)] for sensing and manipulating the rotation of a bosonic ring condensate with minimal destruction, in situ and in real time. Here, we theoretically investigate other coherent interference effects that can be supported by the proposed configuration. Specifically, in the presence of a strong control beam, we analyze the influence of atomic rotation on the transmission spectrum of a weak probe laser through a cavity containing a ring condensate. We present a detailed study of the resulting narrow probe transmission profiles and group delay and show that they can be tuned by means of persistent currents. Our results explore a facet of rotating matter waves and are relevant to applications such as atomtronics, sensing, and information processing.

Nanodiamonds containing luminescent point defects are widely explored for applications in quantum biosensing such as nanoscale magnetometry, thermometry, and electrometry. A key challenge in the development of such applications is the large variation in fluorescence properties observed between particles, even when obtained from the same batch or nominally identical fabrication processes. By theoretically modeling the emission of nitrogen-vacancy color centers in spherical nanoparticles, we are able to show that the fluorescence spectrum varies with the exact position of the emitter within the nanoparticle, with noticeable effects seen when the diamond radius, $a$, is larger than around 100 nm, and significantly modified fluorescence profiles found for larger particles when $a=200$ and 300 nm, with negligible effects below $a=100$ nm. These results show that the reproducible geometry of point defect position within a narrowly sized batch of diamond crystals is necessary for controlling the emission properties. Our results are useful for understanding the extent to which nanodiamonds can be optimized for biosensing applications.

The relation between projective measurements and generalized quantum measurements is a fundamental problem in quantum physics, and clarifying this issue is also important to quantum technologies. While it has been intuitively known that projective measurements can be constructed from sequential generalized or weak measurements, there is still lack of a proof of this hypothesis in general cases. Here we prove it from the perspective of quantum channels. We show that projective measurements naturally arise from sequential generalized measurements in the asymptotic limit, when the measurement operators are normal and commuting with each other. Specifically, a selective projective measurement arises from a set of typical sequences of selective generalized measurements. We also provide an explicit scheme to construct projective measurements of a quantum system with sequential generalized measurements. Remarkably, a single ancilla qubit is sufficient to mediate sequential generalized measurements for constructing arbitrary projective measurements of a generic system, which can have applications in readout, initialization, and feedback control of a quantum system. As an example, we present a protocol to measure the modular excitation numbers of a bosonic mode with an ancilla qubit.

Leggett-Garg inequality (LGI) is used to detect whether the macroscopic superposition state exists. Classical systems obey the LGI, but quantum systems may violate it. In the multilevel system, different state update rules determine different upper bounds of LGI. In this work, we experimentally test the LGI in a three-level trapped-ion system under the Lüders and the von Neumann state update rules, respectively. The maximum observed value of the Leggett-Garg correlator under the von Neumann state update rule is $K_3=1.739\pm 0.014$, which demonstrates a violation of the Lüders bound by 17 standard deviations and is by far the most significant violation under the specific model. The method used in our experiment could also be used in other multilevel experiments in the trapped-ion system.

High-order harmonics generated by a long intense femtosecond laser are known experimentally to create attosecond pulse trains (APTs). In the time domain, an APT consists of a sequence of sharp attosecond bursts that are equally separated by each half optical cycle. Here we show that such well-known features can be modified when a longer wavelength driving laser is used. From our simulations, we show that multiple shorter attosecond sub-bursts exist in the femtosecond pulse train within each half optical cycle and the duration of each sub-burst scales approximately as ${\lambda }_0^{-2}$ with the driving laser wavelength ${\lambda }_0$. We show that such sub-bursts can be found using quantitative rescattering model for harmonics generated from a single atom, and their origin is due to the interference of the quantum orbits from first two returns of the recombining electron. We further show that such sub-bursts can be phase matched under proper laser focusing condition and the position of the gas cell, thus, such new features should be observable experimentally.

A density matrix approach for sequential double ionization (DM-SDI) of molecules has been developed recently and was applied to the ${\mathrm{N}}_2$ molecule [Yuen and Lin, Phys. Rev. A 106, 023120 (2022)]. In this article, we extended the DM-SDI model to ${\mathrm{O}}_2$, which is a more complicated system to model than ${\mathrm{N}}_2$, due to its electronic structures and spin-orbit and laser couplings in the manifold of doubly charged states. We obtained a good agreement on the kinetic energy release spectrum of ${\mathrm{O}}^{+}+{\mathrm{O}}^{+}$ from previous experiments. Thanks to the low computational cost of the model, we explored the mechanism behind the ionization and dissociation dynamics as well as the effects of lasers on the spectrum. This work will pave the way to model sequential dissociative double ionization of larger molecules and to probe molecular dynamics by measuring kinetic energy release spectra from this process.

We present the results of a theoretical study of XUV superfluorescence from doubly excited states of helium resonantly pumped by free-electron laser (FEL) pulses. Our model allows us to predict both the spectrum and angular distribution of emitted XUV radiation in a wide range of experimentally accessible parameters. This is achieved by going beyond two key deficiencies of most previous models: The one-dimensional treatment in space is upgraded to three dimensions with electromagnetic fields treated in the paraxial approximation and spontaneous emission is modeled by a recently developed approach that avoids the unrealistic delayed response but preserves the expected characteristics of the emitted field in the spontaneous emission limit. The case study of $3a{}^1{P}^o$ resonance in helium with $63.66\mathrm{eV}$ excitation energy is presented for realistic parameters of seeded light pulses from the FERMI FEL facility and a recently developed high-pressure gas cell. Results of numerical simulations show that both the spectral width and angular divergence of emitted radiation vary with gas pressure and pump pulse intensity in a complex way.

The transport properties of one-dimensional Fermi gases at low temperatures are often described by the Luttinger liquid (LL) model. However, to study dissipative effects, one needs to examine interactions beyond the LL model. In this work, we provide a simple model that allows for a direct microscopic calculation of the bulk viscosity, namely, the one-dimensional spin polarized $p$-wave Fermi gas. To leading order in the finite interaction strength, we find that the bulk viscosity is finite and consistent with the requirement of scale symmetry. We further show that the bulk viscosity satisfies the Bose-Fermi duality relating the weakly interacting limit of the spin polarized Fermi gas to the strongly interacting limit of the Lieb-Liniger model and vice versa. This work establishes the bulk viscosity to leading order in scale-breaking interactions in both the strongly and weakly interacting limits for both high and low temperatures.

The spin-squeezing protocols allow the dynamical generation of massively correlated quantum many-body states, which can be utilized in entanglement-enhanced metrology and technologies. We study a quantum simulator generating twisting dynamics realized in a two-component Bose-Hubbard model with dipolar interactions. We show that the interplay of contact and long-range dipolar interactions between atoms in the superfluid phase activates the anisotropic two-axis countertwisting mechanism, accelerating the spin-squeezing dynamics and allowing the Heisenberg-limited accuracy in spectroscopic measurements.

We study the space-time structure of the scattered field induced by the scattering of a narrow single-photon Gaussian pulse on a qubit embedded in a one-dimensional open waveguide. For weak excitation power we obtain explicit analytical expressions for the space and time dependence of reflected and transmitted fields which are, in general, different from plane traveling waves. The scattered field consists of two parts: a damping part which represents spontaneous decay of the excited qubit and a coherent, lossless part. We show that for a large distance $x$ from the qubit and at times $t$ long after the scattering event our theory provides the result which is well known from stationary photon transport. However, the approach to the stationary limit is very slow. The scattered field decreases as the inverse powers of $x$ and $t$ as both the distance from the qubit and the time after the interaction increase.

Building on the strategy presented in Opt. Lett. 47, 3992 (2022), we demonstrate an efficient alternative approach for the in situ characterization of ultrashort low-frequency laser pulses. In this context, we employ first-principles quantum-mechanical calculations to model the strong-field ionization of rare-gas atoms and produce autocorrelation patterns for a set of few-femtosecond near-infrared laser pulses. We explore the nonperturbative and nonlinear dependence of the autocorrelation patterns on the pulse characteristics and postulate an analytical function describing these patterns. For every laser pulse considered, we employ the parameters appearing in this analytical function, together with the underlying pulse parameters for supervised machine learning. Specifically, we use the random-forest technique for retrieving key laser pulse parameters from autocorrelation patterns produced via strong-field ionization. The current approach offers advantages for application to experimental data.

We report on measurements of the photon-induced heating of silica nanospheres levitated in a vacuum by a thermal light source formed by a superluminescent diode. Heating of the nanospheres motion along the three trap axes was measured as a function of gas pressure for two particle sizes and recoil heating was shown to dominate other heating mechanisms due to relative intensity noise and beam pointing fluctuations. Heating rates were also compared with the much lower reheating of the same sphere when levitated by a laser.

The degenerate case of normal incidence and reflection of an optical beam (both paraxial and nonparaxial) at a plane isotropic dielectric interface, which is azimuthally symmetric in terms of the momentum-spatial variation of Fresnel coefficients but not in terms of the fundamental polarization inhomogeneity of the incident field, requires in-depth analyses. In this paper, we use the reflection and transmission coefficient matrix formalism to derive an exact field expression of a normal-reflected diverging beam. The availability of the exact field information allows controlled variations of the system parameters, leading to significant dynamics of phase and polarization singularities hitherto unanticipated in the literature. We carry out a detailed exploration of these dynamics in our simulated system, and also verify them experimentally by using an appropriate setup. We then use Barnett's formalism to determine the associated orbital angular momentum (OAM) fluxes, leading to a subtle interpretation and mathematical characterization of spin-orbit interaction (SOI) in the system. Our paper thus represents a nontrivial unification of the most fundamental electromagnetic reflection and transmission problem at a plane dielectric interface and the emerging areas of optical singularity dynamics with their understanding in terms of OAM flux and SOI. The normal-incidence–retroreflection geometry being especially amenable to applications, these beam-field phenomena are anticipated to have applications in interface characterization, particle rotation and manipulation, and other nano-optical processes.