We study polaron excitations induced by an impurity interacting with a two-dimensional $p+ip$ Fermi superfluid. As the Fermi-Fermi pairing interaction is tuned, the background Fermi superfluid undergoes a topological phase transition. We show that such a transition is accompanied by a discontinuity in the second derivative of the polaron energy, regardless of the impurity-fermion interaction. We also identify a polaron to trimer crossover when the Fermi superfluid is in the strongly interacting, thus topologically trivial, regime. However, the trimer state is metastable against the molecular state where the impurity binds a Bogoliubov quasiparticle from the Fermi superfluid. By comparing the polaron to molecule transition in our system with that of an impurity in a noninteracting Fermi sea, we find that pairing interactions in the background Fermi superfluid effectively facilitate the impurity-fermion binding. Our results suggest the possibility of using the impurity as a probe for detecting topological phase transitions in the background; they also reveal interesting competitions between various many-body states in the system.

A single photon, emitted in a transition between two states, has a frequency distribution of intensity that is given by a Lorentzian if the transition is only naturally broadened and the period of observation $T$ is long compared to the lifetime $T_1$ of the excited state. However, when the observation time $T$ is short or comparable to $T_1$, the frequency spectrum is appreciably broadened. If only the delayed part of the emitted radiation field is detected, then the radiation spectrum does not change. However, if the radiation field is transmitted through a resonant absorber and then detected, the transmission spectrum of the delayed radiation field is narrowed. We show that this narrowing is due to the interference of the spectral components of the incident and coherently scattered fields. Experimental spectra of absorption of Mössbauer radiation, obtained by the coincidence technique, confirm this conclusion.

The discovery of photonic hyperbolic dispersion surfaces in certain van der Waals bonded solids, such as hexagonal boron nitride and bismuth selenide (a topological insulator), offers intriguing possibilities for creating strongly modified light-matter interactions. However, open problems exist in quantifying electromagnetic field fluctuations in these media, complicating typical approaches for modeling photonic characteristics. Here, we address this issue by linking the identifying traits of hyperbolic response to a coupling between longitudinal and transverse fields that cannot occur in isotropic media. This description allows us to formulate a gauge theoretic description of the influence of hyperbolic response on electromagnetic fluctuations without explicitly imposing a characteristic size (model of nonlocality)—leading to formally bounded expressions so long as material absorption is included. We then apply this framework to two exemplary areas: the optical sum rule for modified spontaneous emission enhancement in a general uniaxial medium and thermal electromagnetic field fluctuations in hexagonal boron nitride and bismuth selenide. We find that while the sum rule is satisfied, it does not constrain the enhancement of light-matter interactions in either case. We also show that both hexagonal boron nitride and bismuth selenide possess broad spectral regions where the magnitude of electromagnetic field fluctuations are over 120 times larger, and over 800 times larger along specific angular directions, than they are in vacuum.

We present an analytical method for the two-qubit quantum Rabi model. While still operating in the frame of the generalized rotating-wave approximation (GRWA), our method further embraces the idea of introducing variational parameters. The optimal value of the variational parameter is determined by minimizing the energy function of the ground state. Comparing with numerically exact results, we show that our method evidently improves the accuracy of the conventional GRWA in calculating fundamental physical quantities, such as energy spectra, mean photon number, and dynamics. Interestingly, the accuracy of our method allows us to reproduce the asymptotic behavior of a mean photon number in a large frequency ratio for the ground state and investigate the quasiperiodical structure of the time evolution, which the GRWA is incapable of predicting. The applicable parameter ranges cover the ultrastrong-coupling regime, which will be helpful to recent experiments.

We study the transport of few-photon states in open disordered nonlinear photonic lattices. More specifically, we consider a waveguide quantum electrodynamics (QED) setup where photons are scattered from a chain of nonlinear resonators with on-site Bose-Hubbard interaction in the presence of an incommensurate potential. Applying our recently developed diagrammatic technique that evaluates the scattering matrix (S matrix) via absorption and emission diagrams, we compute the two-photon transmission probability and show that it carries signatures of the underlying localization transition of the system. We compare the calculated probability to the participation ratio of the eigenstates and find close agreement for a range of interaction strengths. The scaling of the two-photon transmission probability suggests that there might be two localization transitions in the high energy eigenstates corresponding to interaction and quasiperiodicity respectively. This observation is absent from the participation ratio. We analyze the robustness of the transmission signatures against local dissipation and briefly discuss possible implementation using current technology.

Harmonic generation from solid surfaces is a promising tool for producing high-energy attosecond pulses. We report shaping of the harmonic spectrum to achieve the bandwidth necessary for attosecond pulse generation. The shaping is demonstrated for lower as well as for higher harmonics using single and two-pulse pumping. The measured harmonic field autocorrelation function exhibits attosecond spikes in good agreement with the harmonic spectrum. Double slit experiments reveal a high spatial coherence of the harmonic beam.

Optical bistability of exciton polaritons in semiconductor microcavities is a promising platform for digital optical devices. Steady states of coherently driven polaritons can be toggled back and forth in tens of picoseconds under short external pulses of appropriate amplitude and phase. We have analyzed the switching behavior depending on the pulse amplitude, phase, and duration. The switches are found to change dramatically when the inverse pulse duration becomes comparable to the frequency detuning between the driving field and polariton resonance. If the detuning is large compared to the polariton linewidth, the system becomes extremely sensitive to initial conditions and thus responds unpredictably.

The creation of multipartite entangled states is a key task of quantum information processing. Among the various implementations, shortcut to adiabaticity (STA) offers a fast and robust means for generating entanglement. The traditional counterdiabatic driving, as a conventional and simple method for STA, suppresses transitions with an auxiliary Hamiltonian, but its complex interactions in many-body systems may hamper the feasibility of experimental implementation. To avoid this drawback, a flexible and efficient way was proposed theoretically by Chen et al. [Phys. Rev. A 93, 052109 (2016)] by substituting the counterdiabatic terms. Inspired by this work, we devise a practical protocol for preparing the Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger state on the Ising spin model via STA by partial suppression of the nonadiabatic transitions, which can obviously reduce the complexity in experiments compared with the original method. We also experimentally demonstrate the viability of our scheme with a nuclear magnetic resonance quantum simulator. This work provides an alternative method to realize fast coherent quantum control for a multiqubit system in experiments.

The glued-trees problem is the only example known to date for which quantum annealing provides an exponential speedup, albeit by partly using excited-state evolution, in an oracular setting. How robust is this speedup to noise on the oracle? To answer this, we construct phenomenological short-range and long-range noise models, and noise models that break or preserve the reflection symmetry of the spectrum. We show that under the long-range noise models an exponential quantum speedup is retained. However, we argue that a classical algorithm with an equivalent long-range noise model also exhibits an exponential speedup over the noiseless model. In the quantum setting, the long-range noise is able to lift the spectral gap of the problem so that the evolution changes from diabatic to adiabatic. In the classical setting, long-range noise creates a significant probability of the walker landing directly on the EXIT vertex. Under short-range noise the exponential speedup is lost, but a polynomial quantum speedup is retained for sufficiently weak noise. In contrast to noise range, we find that breaking of spectral symmetry by the noise has no significant impact on the performance of the noisy algorithms. Our results about the long-range models highlight that care must be taken in selecting phenomenological noise models so as not to change the nature of the computational problem. We conclude from the short-range noise model results that the exponential speedup in the glued-trees problem is not robust to noise, but a polynomial quantum speedup is still possible.

A single-center method for calculating photodetachment cross section for anions and radiative electron attachment cross section for neutral molecules by microreversibility is presented. It uses the integral equation method to calculate the ejected electron's continuum wave function while the single-electron bound function of the anion is described by the Dyson orbital. It is compared with related theoretical approaches and benchmarked to the experimental photodetachment cross sections of ${{\mathrm{O}}_2}^{-}$, ${\mathrm{OH}}^{-}$, and ${\mathrm{CN}}^{-}$. The use of the plane-wave approximation of the ejected electron wave function combined with the Hartree-Fock frozen-core approximation of the Dyson orbital is also considered and its results are compared with those of our methods and with experiment. A good agreement between the calculated photodetachment cross sections and the experimental data is obtained for ${{\mathrm{O}}_2}^{-}$ and ${\mathrm{CN}}^{-}$ when using the three methods. For ${\mathrm{OH}}^{-}$, the calculated scattering-wave electron photodetachment cross sections agree well with two most recent sets of experimental data among the three available while the plane-wave results disagree with all the experimental and theoretical data. The different approaches to calculate the Dyson orbital are also discussed as well as the convergence of the calculations with respect to the choice of the one-electron basis set. The approximation of Dyson orbitals by Kohn-Sham orbitals appears to overestimate the photodetachment cross section.

A laser consisting of two independently pumped resonators can exhibit mode bifurcations that evolve out of the exceptional points (EPs) of the linear system at threshold. The EPs are non-Hermitian degeneracies occurring at the parity–time-reversal $\left(\mathcal{PT}\right)$ symmetry-breaking points of the threshold system. Above threshold, the EPs become bifurcations of the nonlinear zero-detuned laser modes, which can be most easily observed by making the gain saturation intensities in the two resonators substantially different. Small pump variations can then switch abruptly between different laser behavior, e.g., between below-threshold and $\mathcal{PT}$-broken single-mode operation.

We analyze nonequilibrium phase transitions in microcavity polariton condensates trapped in optically induced annular potentials. We develop an analytic model for annular optical traps, which gives an intuitive interpretation for recent experimental observations on the polariton spatial mode switching with variation of the trap size. In the vicinity of polariton lasing threshold we then develop a nonlinear mean-field model accounting for interactions and gain saturation, and identify several bifurcation scenarios leading to formation of high angular momentum quantum vortices. For experimentally relevant parameters we predict the emergence of spatially and temporally ordered polariton condensates (time crystals), which can be witnessed by frequency combs in the polariton lasing spectrum or by direct time-resolved optical emission measurements. In contrast to previous realizations, our polaritonic time crystal is spontaneously formed from an incoherent excitonic bath and does not inherit its frequency from any periodic driving field.

It is shown that discrete-time quantum walks can be used to digitize, i.e., to time discretize fermionic models of continuous-time lattice gauge theory. The resulting discrete-time dynamics is thus not only manifestly unitary, but also ultralocal, i.e., the particle's speed is upper bounded, as in standard relativistic quantum field theories. The lattice chiral symmetry of staggered fermions, which corresponds to a translational invariance, is lost after the requirement of ultralocality of the evolution; this fact is an instance of Meyer's 1996 no-go results stating that no nontrivial scalar quantum cellular automaton can be translationally invariant [D. A. Meyer, J. Stat. Phys. 85, 551 (1996); Phys. Lett. A 223, 337 (1996)]. All results are presented in a single-particle framework and for a (1+1)-dimensional space-time.

Excitation-energy transfer problems in molecular aggregates have attracted intensive research interests for their fundamental importance. It is usually supposed that the total density operator at time $t=0$ is a factorized product of single-excitation system state and thermal equilibrium bath state. The Franck-Condon principle ensures that it is a good approximation for a rapid photoexcitation. For natural photosynthesis, however, the transfer process in light-harvesting complexes mostly is initialized from an excited molecule, not direct absorption of a photon. Such intermolecular excitations span the same time scale as the transfer dynamics, and longer than the characteristic time of bath relaxation. Therefore, the initial system-bath correlations should be reconsidered. This work extends the coherent resonant energy transfer theory by including initial system-bath correlations. Within the approach of a second-order time-convolutionless quantum master equation in the polaron frame, a general time evolution equation for the reduced system density operator is obtained, including detailed expressions for both homogeneous and inhomogeneous terms. Two essentially distinct kinds of nonequilibrium are identified: one stems from subsistent initial system-bath correlations, while the other is from the theory of polaron transformation itself. The two kinds of nonequilibrium can accelerate or slow down the dynamical evolution for different energetic situations. Rate equations based on Förster-Dexter theory with and without initial correlations are also derived for comparison. Besides, our conclusions provide a positive perspective accounting for the quantum coherence induced by initial system-bath correlations, which may help to clarify the long-lasting issue of whether quantum phenomenons might be observed under natural conditions of excitation by incoherent solar light, and deepen understandings of the physical mechanisms underlying the natural photosynthesis process.

We compute Landau-Zener probabilities for three-level systems with a linear sweep of the uncoupled energy levels of the $3\times 3$ Hamiltonian matrix $H\left(t\right)$. Two symmetry classes of Hamiltonians are studied: For $H\left(t\right)\in$ su(2) (expressible as a linear combination of the three spin-1 matrices), an analytic solution to the dynamical problem is obtained in terms of the parabolic cylinder $D$ functions. For $H\left(t\right)\in$ su(3) (expressible as a linear combination of the eight Gell-Mann matrices), numerical solutions are calculated. In the adiabatic regime, full population transfer is obtained asymptotically at large times, but at intermediate times, all three levels are populated, and Stückelberg oscillations can manifest from the occurrence of two avoided crossings. For the open system, (wherein interaction with a reservoir occurs), we numerically solve a Markovian quantum master equation for the density matrix with Lindblad operators that models interaction with isotropic white Gaussian noise. We find that Stückelberg oscillations are suppressed and that the decoherence cannot be modeled in terms of a simple exponential.

In this paper, we present a detailed study on discrete-time Dirac quantum walks (DQWs) on triangular and honeycomb lattices. At the continuous limit, these DQWs coincide with the Dirac equation. Their differences in the discrete regime are analyzed through the dispersion relations, with special emphasis on Zitterbewegung. An extension which couples these walks to arbitrary discrete electromagnetic field is also proposed and the resulting Bloch-like oscillations are discussed.

We numerically study spin transport and spin-density profiles after a local quench in a clean one-dimensional spin chain with long-range interactions, decaying as a power law, $r^{-\alpha }$ with distance. We find two distinct regimes of transport: for $\alpha <1/2$, spin excitations relax instantaneously in the thermodynamic limit, and for $\alpha >1/2$, spin transport combines both diffusive and superdiffusive features. We show that while for $\alpha >3/2$ the spin diffusion coefficient is finite, transport in the system is never strictly diffusive, contrary to corresponding classical systems.