We prove that the correlations present in a multipartite quantum state have an operational quantum character even if the state is unentangled, as long as it does not simply encode a multipartite classical probability distribution. Said quantumness is revealed by the new task of local broadcasting, i.e., of locally sharing preestablished correlations, which is feasible if and only if correlations are stricly classical. Our operational approach leads to natural definitions of measures for quantumness of correlations. It also reproduces the standard no-broadcasting theorem as a special case.

We consider a Fermi gas with two components of different masses, with the $s$-wave two-body interaction tuned to unitarity. In the range of mass ratio $8.62<M/m<13.6$, it is possible for a short-range interaction between heavy fermions to produce a resonance in a three-body channel. The resulting system is scale invariant and has universal properties, and is very strongly interacting. When $M/m$ is slightly above the lower limit 8.62, the ground state energy of a $2:1$ mixture of heavy and light fermions is less than 2% of the energy of a noninteracting gas with the same number densities. We derive exact relationships between the pressures of the unitary Fermi gases with and without three-body resonance when the mass ratio is close to the critical values of 8.62 and 13.6.

Starting with a Gaussian variational ansatz, we predict anisotropic bright solitons in quasi-2D Bose-Einstein condensates consisting of atoms with dipole moments polarized perpendicular to the confinement direction. Unlike isotropic solitons predicted for the moments aligned with the confinement axis [Phys. Rev. Lett. 95, 200404 (2005)], no sign reversal of the dipole-dipole interaction is necessary to support the solitons. Direct 3D simulations confirm their stability.

We have experimentally demonstrated a decoy-state quantum key distribution scheme (QKD) with a heralded single-photon source based on parametric down-conversion. We used a one-way Bennett-Brassard 1984 protocol with a four states and one-detector phase-coding scheme, which is immune to recently proposed time-shift attacks, photon-number splitting attacks, and can also be proven to be secure against Trojan horse attacks and any other standard individual or coherent attacks. In principle, the setup can tolerate the highest losses or it can give the highest secure key generation rate under fixed losses compared with other practical schemes. This makes it a quite promising candidate for future quantum key distribution systems.

One of the most significant and well-known properties of entangled states is that they may lead to violations of Bell inequalities and are thus inconsistent with any local-realistic theory. However, there are entangled states that cannot violate any Bell inequality, and in general the precise relationship between entanglement and observable nonlocality is not well understood. We demonstrate that a violation of the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt (CHSH) inequality can be demonstrated in a certain kind of Bell experiment for all entangled states. Our proof of the result consists of two main steps. We first provide a simple characterization of the set of states that do not violate the CHSH inequality even after general local operations and classical communication. Second, we prove that for each entangled state $\sigma$, there exists another state $\rho$ not violating the CHSH inequality, such that $\rho \otimes \sigma$ violates the CHSH inequality.

Supersymmetry is assumed to be a basic symmetry of the world in many high-energy theories, but none of the superpartners of any known elementary particle have been observed yet. We argue that supersymmetry can also be realized and studied in ultracold atomic systems with a mixture of bosons and fermions, with properly tuned interactions and single particle dispersion. We further show that in such nonrelativistic systems supersymmetry is either spontaneously broken or explicitly broken by a chemical potential difference between the bosons and fermions. In both cases the system supports a sharp fermionic collective mode similar to the Goldstino mode in high-energy physics, due to supersymmetry. We also discuss possible ways to detect this mode experimentally.

We show that correlated hopping of triplets, which is often the dominant source of kinetic energy in dimer-based frustrated quantum magnets, produces a remarkably strong tendency to form supersolid phases in a magnetic field. These phases are characterized by simultaneous modulation and ordering of the longitudinal and transverse magnetization, respectively. Using quantum Monte Carlo and a semiclassical approach for an effective hard-core boson model with nearest-neighbor repulsion on a square lattice, we prove, in particular, that a supersolid phase can exist even if the repulsion is not strong enough to stabilize an insulating phase at half-filling. Experimental implications for frustrated quantum antiferromagnets in a magnetic field at zero and finite temperature are discussed.

We investigate the behavior of a weakly interacting nearly one-dimensional trapped Bose gas at finite temperature. We perform in situ measurements of spatial density profiles and show that they are very well described by a model based on exact solutions obtained using the Yang-Yang thermodynamic formalism, in a regime where other, approximate theoretical approaches fail. We use Bose-gas focusing [I. Shvarchuck et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 89, 270404 (2002)] to probe the axial momentum distribution of the gas and find good agreement with the in situ results.

Exact solutions of the Schrödinger equation describing a freely expanding Lieb-Liniger gas of delta-interacting bosons in one spatial dimension are constructed. We demonstrate that for any interaction strength the system enters a strongly correlated regime during such expansion. The asymptotic form of the wave function is shown to have the form characteristic for “impenetrable-core” bosons. Exact solutions are obtained by transforming a fully antisymmetric (fermionic) time-dependent wave function that obeys the Schrödinger equation for a free gas. This transformation employs a differential Fermi-Bose mapping operator that depends on the strength of the interaction and the number of particles.

We report on the control of interaction-induced dephasing of Bloch oscillations for an atomic Bose-Einstein condensate in an optical lattice. We quantify the dephasing in terms of the width of the quasimomentum distribution and measure its dependence on time for different interaction strengths which we control by means of a Feshbach resonance. For minimal interaction, the dephasing time is increased from a few to more than 20 thousand Bloch oscillation periods, allowing us to realize a BEC-based atom interferometer in the noninteracting limit.

We demonstrate the operation of an atom interferometer based on a weakly interacting Bose-Einstein condensate. We strongly reduce the interaction induced decoherence that usually limits interferometers based on trapped condensates by tuning the $s$-wave scattering length almost to zero via a magnetic Feshbach resonance. We employ a ${}^{39}\mathrm{K}$ condensate trapped in an optical lattice, where Bloch oscillations are forced by gravity. The fine-tuning of the scattering length down to $0.1a_0$ and the micrometric sizes of the atomic sample make our system a very promising candidate for measuring forces with high spatial resolution. Our technique can be in principle extended to other measurement schemes opening new possibilities in the field of trapped atom interferometry.

Does bound entanglement naturally appear in quantum many-body systems? We address this question by showing the existence of bound-entangled thermal states for harmonic oscillator systems consisting of an arbitrary number of particles. By explicit calculations of the negativity for different partitions, we find a range of temperatures for which no entanglement can be distilled by means of local operations, despite the system being globally entangled. We offer an interpretation of this result in terms of entanglement-area laws, typical of these systems. Finally, we discuss generalizations of this result to other systems, including spin chains.

For any $D$-dimensional quantum lattice system, the fidelity between two ground state many-body wave functions is mapped onto the partition function of a $D$-dimensional classical statistical vertex lattice model with the same lattice geometry. The fidelity per lattice site, analogous to the free energy per site, is well defined in the thermodynamic limit and can be used to characterize the phase diagram of the model. We explain how to compute the fidelity per site in the context of tensor network algorithms, and demonstrate the approach by analyzing the two-dimensional quantum Ising model with transverse and parallel magnetic fields.

We investigate the decay of entanglement of generalized $N$-particle Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) states interacting with independent reservoirs. Scaling laws for the decay of entanglement and for its finite-time extinction (sudden death) are derived for different types of reservoirs. The latter is found to increase with $N$. However, entanglement becomes arbitrarily small, and therefore useless as a resource, much before it completely disappears, around a time which is inversely proportional to the number of particles. We also show that the decay of multiparticle GHZ states can generate bound entangled states.

A new thermodynamic inequality is derived which leads to the maximum work that can be extracted from multi-heat-baths with the assistance of discrete quantum feedback control. The maximum work is determined by the free-energy difference and a generalized mutual information content between the thermodynamic system and the feedback controller. This maximum work can exceed that in conventional thermodynamics and, in the case of a heat cycle with two heat baths, the heat efficiency can be greater than that of the Carnot cycle. The consistency of our results with the second law of thermodynamics is ensured by the fact that work is needed for information processing of the feedback controller.

We reconsider the non-Markovian time-continuous measurement of a Heisenberg observable $\widehat{x}$ and show for the first time that it can be realized by an infinite set of entangled von Neumann detectors. The concept of continuous readout is introduced and used to rederive the non-Markovian stochastic Schrödinger equation. We can prove that, contrary to recent doubts, the resulting non-Markovian quantum trajectories are true single system trajectories and correspond to the continuous measurement of a retarded functional of $\widehat{x}$.

We report the first results of the GammeV experiment, a search for milli-eV mass particles with axionlike couplings to two photons. The search is performed using a “light shining through a wall” technique where incident photons oscillate into new weakly interacting particles that are able to pass through the wall and subsequently regenerate back into detectable photons. The oscillation baseline of the apparatus is variable, thus allowing probes of different values of particle mass. We find no excess of events above background and are able to constrain the two-photon couplings of possible new scalar (pseudoscalar) particles to be less than $3.1\times {10}^{-7}{\mathrm{GeV}}^{-1}$ ($3.5\times {10}^{-7}{\mathrm{GeV}}^{-1}$) in the limit of massless particles.

We investigate entanglement of strongly interacting fermions in spatially inhomogeneous environments. To quantify entanglement in the presence of spatial inhomogeneity, we propose a local-density approximation (LDA) to the entanglement entropy, and a nested LDA scheme to evaluate the entanglement entropy on inhomogeneous density profiles. These ideas are applied to models of electrons in superlattice structures with different modulation patterns, electrons in a metallic wire in the presence of impurities, and phase-separated states in harmonically confined many-fermion systems, such as electrons in quantum dots and atoms in optical traps. We find that the entanglement entropy of inhomogeneous systems is strikingly different from that of homogeneous systems.

The multiscale entanglement renormalization ansatz (MERA) is argued to provide a natural description for topological states of matter. The case of Kitaev’s toric code is analyzed in detail and shown to possess a remarkably simple MERA description leading to distillation of the topological degrees of freedom at the top of the tensor network. Kitaev states on an infinite lattice are also shown to be a fixed point of the renormalization group flow associated with entanglement renormalization. All of these results generalize to arbitrary quantum double models.

We introduce a new quantum protocol for solving detectable Byzantine agreement (also called detectable broadcast) between three parties, and also for solving the detectable liar detection problem. The protocol is suggested by the properties of a four-qubit entangled state, and the classical part of the protocol is simpler than that of previous proposals. In addition, we present an experimental implementation of the protocol using four-photon entanglement.