The polarization produced by the relative displacement of the potentials trapping two spin species of a dilute Fermi gas with $N_{\uparrow }=N_{\downarrow }$ is calculated at unitarity by assuming phase separation between the superfluid and a polarized phase at zero temperature. Because of the energy cost associated with pair breaking, the dipole polarizability is strongly quenched and exhibits important deviations from the ideal gas behavior even for nonlinear displacements of the order of the size of the atomic cloud. The behavior in the presence of different trapping frequencies (monopole polarization) for the two spin species is also discussed. Our results suggest new experimental perspectives to explore the quantum phases of interacting Fermi gases.

One way to specify a model of quantum computing is to give a set of control Hamiltonians acting on a quantum state space whose initial state and final measurement are specified in terms of the Hamiltonians. We formalize such models and show that they can be simulated classically in a time polynomial in the dimension of the Lie algebra generated by the Hamiltonians and logarithmic in the dimension of the state space. This leads to a definition of Lie-algebraic “generalized mean-field Hamiltonians.” We show that they are efficiently (exactly) solvable. Our results generalize the known weakness of fermionic linear optics computation and give conditions on control needed to exploit the full power of quantum computing.

We present a general theoretical framework for a hybrid system that is composed of a quantum subsystem and a classical subsystem. We approach such a system with a simple canonical transformation which is particularly effective when the quantum subsystem is dynamically much faster than the classical counterpart, which is commonly the case in hybrid systems. Moreover, this canonical transformation generates a vector potential which, on one hand, gives rise to the familiar Berry phase in the fast quantum dynamics and, on the other hand, yields a Lorentz-like geometric force in the slow classical dynamics.

We present a new method of calculating the distribution function and fluctuations for a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) of $N$ interacting atoms. The present formulation combines our previous master equation and canonical ensemble quasiparticle techniques. It is applicable both for ideal and interacting Bogoliubov BEC and yields remarkable accuracy at all temperatures. For the interacting gas of 200 bosons in a box we plot the temperature dependence of the first four central moments of the condensate particle number and compare the results with the ideal gas. For the interacting mesoscopic BEC, as with the ideal gas, we find a smooth transition for the condensate particle number as we pass through the critical temperature.

We consider many-body states of bosonic spinor atoms which, at the mean-field level, can be characterized by a single-particle wave function for the Bose-Einstein condensation and Mott insulating states. We describe and apply a classification scheme that makes explicit the spin symmetries of such states and enables one to naturally analyze their collective modes and topological excitations. Quite generally, the method allows classification of a spin $F$ system as a polyhedron with $2F$ vertices. We apply the method to the many-body states of bosons with spins two and three. For spin-two atoms we find the ferromagnetic state, a continuum of nematic states, and a state having the symmetry of the point group of the regular tetrahedron. For spin-three atoms we obtain similar ferromagnetic and nematic phases as well as states having symmetries of various types of polyhedra with six vertices.

We study polar molecules in a stack of strongly confined pancake traps. When dipole moments point perpendicular to the planes of the traps and are sufficiently strong, the system is stable against collapse but attractive interaction between molecules in different layers leads to the formation of dipolar chains, analogously to the chaining phenomenon in classical rheological electro- and magnetofluids. We analyze properties of the resulting quantum liquid of dipolar chains and show that only the longest chains undergo Bose-Einstein condensation with a strongly reduced condensation temperature. We discuss several experimental methods for studying chains of polar molecules.

We present a method to determine the critical rotational frequencies for superfluidity of both uniform and trapped Fermi gases across a wide Feshbach resonance. It is found that as one approaches the resonance from the BCS side, beyond a critical scattering length, pairing is so robust that superfluidity cannot be destroyed by rotation. Moreover, the critical frequency has a sequence of jumps revealing the appearance of Landau levels, which are particularly prominent for systems up to a few thousand particles. For rotational frequency below an ultimate critical frequency, defined to be the lowest frequency at which the center of the cloud goes normal, a trapped gas has a superfluid core surrounded by a normal gas, as seen in recent experiments (C. H. Schunck et al., cond-mat/0607298).

A duality between the properties of many spinor bosons on a regular lattice and those of a single particle on a weighted graph reveals that a quantum particle can traverse an infinite hierarchy of networks with perfect probability in polynomial time, even as the number of nodes increases exponentially. The one-dimensional “quantum wire” and the hypercube are special cases in this construction, where the number of spin degrees of freedom is equal to one and the number of particles, respectively. An implementation of a near-perfect quantum state transfer across a weighted parallelepiped with ultracold atoms in optical lattices is discussed.

The recent experiment by Shin et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 93, 160406 (2004)] on the decay of a doubly quantized vortex is analyzed by numerically solving the Gross-Pitaevskii equation. Our results demonstrate that the vortex decay is mainly a consequence of dynamical instability. The monotonic increase observed in the vortex lifetimes is a consequence of the fact that the measured lifetimes incorporate the time it takes for the initial perturbation to reach the central slice. When considered locally, the splitting occurs approximately at the same time in every condensate.

We describe bichromatic superradiant pump-probe spectroscopy as a tomographic probe of the Wigner function of a dispersing particle beam. We employed this technique to characterize the quantum state of an ultracold atomic beam, derived from a ${}^{87}\mathrm{Rb}$ Bose-Einstein condensate, as it propagated in a 2.5 mm diameter circular waveguide. Our measurements place an upper bound on the longitudinal phase space area occupied by the $3\times {10}^5$ atom beam of $9(1)\hslash$ and a lower bound on the coherence length of $\mathcal{L}\ge 13(1)\mu \mathrm{m}$. These results are consistent with full quantum degeneracy after multiple orbits around the waveguide.

In this Letter we study various spin correlated insulating states of $F=2$ cold atoms in optical lattices. We find that the effective spin exchange interaction due to virtual hopping contains an octopole coupling between two neighboring lattice sites. Depending on scattering lengths and numbers of particles per site the ground states are either rotationally invariant dimer or trimer Mott insulators or insulating states with various spin orders. Three spin-ordered insulating phases are ferromagnetic, cyclic, and nematic Mott insulators. We estimate the phase boundaries for states with different numbers of atoms per lattice site.

In the framework of the Gross-Pitaevskii mean field approach, it is shown that the supersonic flow of a Bose-Einstein condensate can support a new type of pattern—an oblique dark soliton. The corresponding exact solution of the Gross-Pitaevskii equation is obtained. It is demonstrated by numerical simulations that oblique solitons can be generated by an obstacle inserted into the flow.

An interaction-free measurement protocol is described for a quantum circuit consisting of a superconducting qubit and a readout Josephson junction. By measuring the state of the qubit, one can ascertain the presence of a current pulse through the circuit at a previous time without any energy exchange between the qubit and the pulse.

Quantized vortex-core structure is theoretically investigated in fermion superfluids with population imbalance for two atom species of neutral atom clouds near a Feshbach resonance. In contrast with the vortex core in balance case where the quantum depletion makes a vortex visible through the density profile measurement, the vortex core is filled in and becomes less visible because the quantized discrete bound states are occupied exclusively by the majority species. Yet it is shown that the core can be visible through the minority density profile experiment using phase contrast imaging, revealing an interesting opportunity to examine low-lying fermionic core bound states unexplored so far.

We consider nonlinear boson states with a nontrivial phase structure in the three-site Bose-Hubbard ring, quantum discrete vortices (or $q$ vortices), and study their “melting” under the action of quantum fluctuations. We calculate the spatial correlations in the ground states to show the superfluid-insulator crossover and analyze the fidelity between the exact and variational ground states to explore the validity of the classical analysis. We examine the phase coherence and the effect of quantum fluctuations on $q$ vortices and reveal that the breakdown of these coherent structures through quantum fluctuations accompanies the superfluid-insulator crossover.

We demonstrate a fast, robust, and nondestructive protocol for quantum-state estimation based on continuous weak measurement in the presence of a controlled dynamical evolution. Our experiment uses optically probed atomic spins as a test bed and successfully reconstructs a range of trial states with fidelities of $\sim 90\%$. The procedure holds promise as a practical diagnostic tool for the study of complex quantum dynamics, the testing of quantum hardware, and as a starting point for new types of quantum feedback control.

We report on the observation of ultracold heteronuclear Feshbach molecules. Starting with a ${}^{87}\mathrm{Rb}$ Bose-Einstein condensate and a cold atomic gas of ${}^{85}\mathrm{Rb}$, we utilize previously unobserved interspecies Feshbach resonances to create up to 25 000 molecules. Even though the ${}^{85}\mathrm{Rb}$ gas is nondegenerate, we observe a large molecular conversion efficiency due to the presence of a quantum degenerate ${}^{87}\mathrm{Rb}$ gas; this represents a key feature of our system. We compare the molecule creation at two different Feshbach resonances with different magnetic-field widths. The two Feshbach resonances are located at $265.44\pm 0.15\mathrm{G}$ and $372.4\pm 1.3\mathrm{G}$. We also directly measure the small binding energy of the molecules through resonant magnetic-field association.

In quantum physics, the density operator completely describes the state. Instead, in classical physics the mean value of physical quantities is evaluated by means of a probability distribution. We study the possibility to describe pure quantum states and events with classical probability distributions and conditional probabilities and prove that the distributions have to be nonlinear functions of the density operator. Some examples are considered. Finally, we deal with the exponential complexity problem of quantum physics and introduce the concept of classical dimension for a quantum system.

We study a new quantum heat engine (QHE), which is assisted by a Maxwell’s demon. The QHE requires three steps: thermalization, quantum measurement, and quantum feedback controlled by the Maxwell demon. We derive the positive-work condition and operation efficiency of this composite QHE. Using controllable superconducting quantum circuits as an example, we show how to construct our QHE. The essential role of the demon is explicitly demonstrated in this macroscopic QHE.

We construct a class of topological quantum codes to perform quantum entanglement distillation. These codes implement the whole Clifford group of unitary operations in a fully topological manner and without selective addressing of qubits. This allows us to extend their application also to quantum teleportation, dense coding, and computation with magic states.