Local distinguishability of sets of generalized Bell states (GBSs) is investigated. We first clarify the conditions such that a set of GBSs can be locally transformed to a certain type of GBS set that is easily distinguishable within local operations and one-way classical communication. We then show that if the space dimension $d$ is a prime, these conditions are necessary and sufficient for sets of $d$ GBSs in ${\mathbb{C}}^d\otimes {\mathbb{C}}^d$ to be locally distinguishable. Thus we obtain a simple computable criterion for local distinguishability of sets of $d$ GBSs in prime dimension $d$.

Composite pulses are an efficient tool for robust quantum control. In this work, we derive the form of the composite pulse sequence to implement robust single-qubit gates in a three-level system, where two low-energy levels act as a qubit. The composite pulses can efficiently cancel the systematic errors up to a certain order. We find that the three-pulse sequence cannot completely eliminate the first order of systematic errors, but still availably makes the fidelity resistant to variations in a specific direction. When employing more pulses in the sequence ($N>3$), the fidelity can be insensitive to the variations in all directions and the robustness region becomes much wider. Finally we demonstrate the applications of composite pulses in quantum information processing, e.g., robust quantum information transfer between two qubits.

We have studied the fundamental rotational relaxation and excitation collision of ${\mathrm{OH}}^{-}J=0\leftrightarrow 1$ with helium at different collision energies. Using state-selected photodetachment in a cryogenic ion trap, the collisional excitation of the first excited rotational state of ${\mathrm{OH}}^{-}$ has been investigated and absolute inelastic collision rate coefficients have been extracted for collision temperatures between 20 and 35 K. The rates are compared with accurate quantum scattering calculations for three different potential-energy surfaces. Good agreement is found within the experimental accuracy, but the experimental trend of increasing collision rates with temperature is only in part reflected in the calculations.

In the mixture of ultracold spin-1 atoms of two different species A and B (e.g., ${}^{23}\mathrm{Na}$ (A) and ${}^{87}\mathrm{Rb}$ (B)), the interspecies singlet-pairing process ${\mathrm{A}}_{+1}+{\mathrm{B}}_{-1}\rightleftharpoons {\mathrm{A}}_{-1}+{\mathrm{B}}_{+1}$ can be induced by the spin-dependent interatomic interaction, where subscript $\pm 1$ denotes the magnetic quantum number. Nevertheless, one cannot isolate this process from other spin-changing processes, which are usually much stronger, by tuning the bias real magnetic field. As a result, it is difficult to clearly observe the singlet-pairing process and precisely measure the corresponding interaction strength. In this work we propose to control the singlet-pairing process via combining the real magnetic field and a laser-induced species-dependent synthetic magnetic field. With our approach one can significantly enhance this process and simultaneously suppress all other spin-changing processes. We illustrate our approach for both a confined two-atom system and a binary mixture of spinor Bose-Einstein condensates. Our control scheme is helpful for the precise measurement of the weak singlet-pairing interaction strength and the entanglement generation of two different atoms.

The generation and verification of large-scale entanglement are essential to the development of quantum technologies. In this paper, we present an efficient scheme to generate genuine multipartite entanglement of a large number of qubits by using the Heisenberg interaction. This method can be conveniently implemented in various physical platforms, including superconducting, trapped-ion, and cold-atom systems. In order to characterize the entanglement of the output quantum state, we generalize the stabilizer formalism and develop an entanglement witness method. In particular, we design a generic searching algorithm to optimize entanglement witness with a minimal number of measurement settings under a given noise level. From the perspective of practical applications, we numerically study the trade-off between the experiment efficiency and the detection robustness.

Entanglement is the central resource in adiabatic quantum transport. Dephasing affects the availability of that resource by biasing trajectories, driving transitions between success and failure. This depletion of entanglement is important for the practical implementation of quantum technologies. We present an alternative perspective on the failure of adiabatic computation by understanding the failure of adiabatic transport as a dynamical phase transition. These ideas are demonstrated in a toy model of adiabatic quantum transport in a two-spin system.

We show that space- and time-correlated single-qubit rotation errors can lead to high-weight errors in a quantum circuit when the rotation angles are drawn from heavy-tailed distributions. This leads to a breakdown of quantum error correction, yielding reduced or, in some cases, no protection of the encoded logical qubits. While heavy-tailed phenomena are prevalent in the natural world, there is very little research as to whether noise with these statistics exists in current quantum processing devices. Furthermore, it is an open problem to develop tomographic or noise spectroscopy protocols that could test for the existence of noise with such statistics. These results suggest the need for quantum characterization methods that can reliably detect or reject the presence of such errors together with continued first-principles studies of the origins of space- and time-correlated noise in quantum processors. If such noise does exist, physical or control-based mitigation protocols must be developed to mitigate this noise as it would severely hinder the performance of fault-tolerant quantum computers.

Quantum data locking is a quantum communication primitive that allows the use of a short secret key to encrypt a much longer message. It guarantees information-theoretical security against an adversary with limited quantum memory. Here we present a quantum data locking protocol that employs pseudorandom circuits consisting of Clifford gates only, which are much easier to implement fault tolerantly than universal gates. We show that information can be encrypted into $n$-qubit code words using order $n-H_{\min }\left(\mathsf{X}\right)$ secret bits, where $H_{\min }\left(\mathsf{X}\right)$ is the min-entropy of the plain text, and a min-entropy smaller than $n$ accounts for information leakage to the adversary. As an application, we discuss an efficient method for encrypting the output of a quantum computer.

Coherent control of interfering one- and two-photon processes has for decades been the subject of research to achieve the redirection of photocurrent. The present study develops two-pathway coherent control of ground-state helium atom above-threshold photoionization for energies up to the $N=2$ threshold, based on a multichannel quantum defect and R-matrix calculation. Three parameters are controlled in our treatment: the optical interference phase $\mathrm{\Delta }\mathrm{\Phi }$, the reduced electric field strength $\chi ={\mathcal{E}}_{\omega }^2/{\mathcal{E}}_{2\omega }$, and the final state energy $\epsilon$. A small energy change near a resonance is shown to flip the emission direction of photoelectrons with high efficiency, through an example where $90\%$ of photoelectrons whose energy is near the $2p^2{}^1{S}^e$ resonance flip their emission direction. However, the large fraction of photoelectrons ionized at the intermediate state energy, which are not influenced by the optical control, make this control scheme challenging to realize experimentally.

We measured the ellipticity dependence of the harmonic yield of He, Ne, Ar, Kr, and Xe. It is found that the harmonic yield in general decreases monotonically with increasing laser ellipticity but anomalous dependence does occur for each atom for some harmonic orders. We found that the degree of anomaly is weakest in helium but is stronger for the heavier atoms. The anomaly also depends on laser intensity. To explain these features, we developed a quantum trajectory Monte Carlo (QTMC) model based on the quantum path integral theory to study high-order harmonic generation (HHG). The model includes the effect of Coulomb potential from the target ion, thus it is capable of calculating near-threshold harmonics quantitatively. This model reveals that the presence of Coulomb potential would generate orbiting trajectories which are responsible for the anomalous ellipticity dependence near the threshold.

The electronic defect states resulting from doping ${}^{229}\mathrm{Th}$ in ${\mathrm{CaF}}_2$ offer a unique opportunity to excite the nuclear isomeric state ${}^{229\mathrm{m}}\mathrm{Th}$ at approximately 8 eV via electronic bridge mechanisms. We consider bridge schemes involving stimulated emission and absorption using an optical laser. The role of different multipole contributions, both for the emitted or absorbed photon and nuclear transition, to the total bridge rates are investigated theoretically. We show that the electric dipole component is dominant for the electronic bridge photon. In contradistinction, the electric quadrupole channel of the ${}^{229}\mathrm{Th}$ isomeric transition plays the dominant role for the bridge processes presented. The driven bridge rates are discussed in the context of background signals in the crystal environment and of implementation methods. We show that inverse electronic bridge processes quenching the isomeric state population can improve the performance of a solid-state nuclear clock based on ${}^{229\mathrm{m}}\mathrm{Th}$.

We theoretically investigate the superfluid properties of a two-band gas of ${}^{173}\mathrm{Yb}$ Fermi atoms with an orbital Feshbach resonance (OFR). To describe the BCS-BEC crossover region, we include superfluid fluctuations caused by interband and intraband pairing interactions associated with OFR by extending the strong-coupling theory developed by Nozières and Schmitt-Rink to the two-band case below the superfluid phase transition temperature; however, the effects of an experimentally inaccessible deep bound state are removed to model a real ${}^{173}\mathrm{Yb}$ Fermi gas near OFR. We show that the condensate fraction in the upper closed channel gradually becomes smaller than that in the lower open channel as one moves from the strong- to the weak-coupling regime, because the OFR-pairing mechanism tunes the interaction strengths by adjusting the energy difference between the two bands. However, even when the closed-channel band is much higher in energy than the open-channel band in the weak-coupling regime, the magnitude of the superfluid order parameter in the closed channel is found to be still comparable to that in the open channel. As the reason for this, we point out a pair-tunneling effect by the OFR-induced interband interaction. In addition to these superfluid quantities, we also examine collective modes, such as the Goldstone mode, the Schmid (Higgs) mode, and Leggett mode, to clarify how they appear in the spectral weights of pair-correlation functions in each band. Since the realization of a multiband superfluid Fermi gas is a crucial issue in cold Fermi gas physics, our results would contribute to the basic understanding of this type of Fermi superfluid in the BCS-BEC crossover region.

Motivated by the recently observed failure of the kinetic theory for the bulk viscosity, we in turn revisit the shear viscosity and the thermal conductivity of two-component fermions with a zero-range interaction both in two and three dimensions. In particular, we show that their Kubo formula evaluated exactly in the high-temperature limit to the lowest order in fugacity is reduced to the linearized Boltzmann equation. Previously, such a microscopic derivation of the latter was achieved only incompletely corresponding to the relaxation-time approximation. Here, we complete it by resuming all contributions that are naively higher orders in fugacity but become comparable in the zero-frequency limit due to the pinch singularity, leading to a self-consistent equation for a vertex function identical to the linearized Boltzmann equation. We then compute the shear viscosity and the thermal conductivity in the high-temperature limit for an arbitrary scattering length and find that the Prandtl number exhibits a nonmonotonic behavior slightly below the constant value in the relaxation-time approximation.

Exploring the physics and potential applications of vectorially structured light with propagation-invariant transverse structures has benefited many areas of modern optics and photonics. In this paper, we investigate the noneigenvector modes of paraxial light fields, focusing on the propagation variations and revivals of their transverse structures, including both spatial and polarization structures. We show that the physical mechanism behind the variations and revivals of their transverse structure is linked to the evolution of the intramodal phases between the constituting spatial modes. Such evolution originates from fractional Gouy phases, or rather, geometric-phase difference between spatial modes with different orders under a same unitary transformation. This underlying principle provides a general guideline for shaping vectorially structured light with custom propagation-evolution properties, and may also inspire a wide variety of new applications based on structured light.

We study modulational instability (MI) in optical fibers with random group-velocity dispersion (GVD) generated by sharply localized perturbations of a normal GVD fiber that are either randomly or periodically placed along the fiber and that have random strength. This perturbation leads to the appearance of low-frequency MI side lobes that grow with the strength of the perturbations, whereas they are faded by randomness in their position. If the random perturbations exhibit a finite average value, they can be compared with periodically perturbed fibers, where parametric resonance tongues (also called Arnold tongues) appear. In that case, increased randomness in the strengths of the variations tends to affect the Arnold tongues less than increased randomness in their positions.

We derive a Born-Markov master equation describing the dissipation induced by a bath of lossy but coherently driven two-level systems (TLSs) coupled to a bosonic system via Jaynes-Cummings interaction. We analytically derive all the master-equation rates. We characterize these rates for the particular case of a single-mode system coupled to identical TLSs. We study the steady state of the system and its exotic properties stemming from the nonthermal stationary state of the driven TLS bath. These properties include dissipative amplification, bath-induced linear instability, and both coherent and dissipative squeezing. The master equation is valid for arbitrarily strong TLS driving and it can be generalized to include multilevel systems or other system-bath interaction terms, among others. Our work provides a tool to study and characterize TLS-induced decoherence, a key limiting factor in quantum technological devices based on, for instance, superconducting circuits, magnonic systems, or quantum acoustics.

The electronic structures of actinide systems are extremely complicated because of strong electron correlations and relativistic effects. The atomic actinide anion poses even more challenges for experimental and theoretical investigations due to the extra loosely bound electron. In this work, we report the electronic structure of ${\mathrm{U}}^{-}$ using the slow-electron velocity-map imaging method. The electron affinity of U was measured to be 314.97(9) meV. Two excited states of ${\mathrm{U}}^{-}$ were observed and their energies were determined to be 84(11) and 160(12) meV above its ground state, respectively. The present study provides convincing evidence that the transition between the first excited state and the ground state of ${\mathrm{U}}^{-}$ is electric dipole (E1) allowed.

We study three-body collisions within ultracold mixtures with resonant interspecies $p$-wave interactions. Our results for the three-body effective interaction strength and decay rate are crucial towards understanding the stability and lifetime of these dilute quantum fluids. On resonance, we find that a class of universal scattering pathways emerges, regardless of the details of the short-range interactions. This gives rise quite generally to a remarkable regime where three-body effective interactions dominate over both inelastic decay and two-body effective interactions. Additionally, we find a series of mass-ratio-dependent trimer resonances further from resonance.

We propose a theory to characterize equilibrium topological phase with nonequilibrium quantum dynamics by introducing the concept of high-order topological charges, with novel phenomena being predicted. Through a dimension reduction approach, we can characterize a $d$-dimensional ($d\mathrm{D}$) integer-invariant topological phase with lower dimensional topological number quantified by high-order topological charges, of which the $s\mathrm{th}$-order topological charges denote the monopoles confined on the $(s-1)\mathrm{th}$-order band inversion surfaces (BISs) that are $(d-s+1)\mathrm{D}$ momentum subspaces. The bulk topology is determined by the $s\mathrm{th}$-order topological charges enclosed by the $s\mathrm{th}$-order BISs. By quenching the system from trivial phase to topological regime, we show that the bulk topology of postquench Hamiltonian can be detected through a high-order dynamical bulk-surface correspondence, in which both the high-order topological charges and high-order BISs are identified from quench dynamics. This characterization theory has essential advantages in two aspects. First, the highest ($d\mathrm{th}$) order topological charges are characterized by only discrete signs of spin polarization in zero dimension (i.e., the $0\mathrm{th}$ Chern numbers), whose measurement is much easier than the first-order topological charges that are characterized by the continuous charge-related spin texture in higher dimensional space. Second, a more striking result is that a first-order high integer valued topological charge always reduces to multiple highest order topological charges with unit charge value, and the latter can be readily detected in experiments. The two fundamental features greatly simplify the characterization and detection of the topological charges and also topological phases, which shall advance the experimental studies in the near future.

The gap between thermal operations (TO) and enhanced thermal operations (EnTO) is an open problem raised in [Phys. Rev. Lett. 115, 210403 (2015)]. It originates from the limitations on coherence evolutions. Here we solve this problem by analytically proving that a state transition induced by EnTO cannot be approximately realized by TO. It confirms that TO and EnTO lead to different laws of state conversions. Our results can also contribute to the study of the restrictions on coherence dynamics in quantum thermodynamics.