An application of quantum cloning to optimally interface a quantum system with a classical observer is presented; in particular, we describe a procedure to perform a minimal disturbance measurement on a single qubit by adopting a $1\to 2$ cloning machine followed by a generalized measurement on a single clone and the anticlone or on the two clones. Such a scheme can be applied to enhance the transmission fidelity over a lossy quantum channel.

We investigate experimentally a Josephson vortex ratchet—a fluxon in an asymmetric periodic potential driven by a deterministic force with zero time average. The highly asymmetric periodic potential is created in an underdamped annular long Josephson junction by means of a current injector providing an efficiency of the device up to 91%. We measured the ratchet effect for driving forces with different spectral content. For monochromatic high-frequency drive the rectified voltage becomes quantized. At high driving frequencies we also observe chaos, subharmonic dynamics, and voltage reversal due to the inertial mass of a fluxon.

We computationally study jammed disordered hard-sphere packings as large as a million particles. We show that the packings are saturated and hyperuniform, i.e., that local density fluctuations grow only as a logarithmically augmented surface area rather than the volume of the window. The structure factor shows an unusual nonanalytic linear dependence near the origin, $S(k)\sim |k|$. In addition to exponentially damped oscillations seen in liquids, this implies a weak power-law tail in the total correlation function, $h(r)\sim -r^{-4}$, and a long-ranged direct correlation function $c(r)$.

We propose a new method of detecting the onset of superfluidity in a two-component ultracold fermionic gas of atoms governed by an attractive short-range interaction. By studying the two-body correlation functions we find that a measurement of the momentum distribution of the density and spin-response functions allows one to access separately the normal and anomalous densities. The change in sign at low momentum transfer of the normal-ordered part of the density response function signals the transition between a BEC and a BCS regime, characterized by small and large pairs, respectively. This change in sign of the density response function represents an unambiguous signature of the BEC-to-BCS crossover. Spin rotational symmetry breaking due to the magnetic field, if observed, can be used to validate the one-channel model.

The time evolution of the fluorescence intensity emitted by well-defined ensembles of green fluorescent proteins has been studied by using a standard confocal microscope. In contrast with previous results obtained in single-molecule experiments, the photobleaching of the ensemble is well described by a model based on Lévy statistics. By assuming the presence of thermally activated barriers, this simple model allows us to obtain information about their height distribution.

We have investigated coherent time evolution of pseudomolecular states of an isolated (leadless) silicon double quantum dot, where operations are carried out via capacitively coupled elements. Manipulation is performed by short pulses applied to a nearby gate, and measurement is performed by a single-electron transistor. The electrical isolation of this qubit results in a significantly longer coherence time than previous reports for semiconductor charge qubits realized in artificial molecules.

We propose a correlation of local observables on many sites in macroscopic quantum systems. By measuring the correlation one can detect, if any, superposition of macroscopically distinct states, which we call macroscopic entanglement, in arbitrary quantum states that are (effectively) homogeneous. Using this property, we also propose an index of macroscopic entanglement.

We show that for qubits and qutrits it is always possible to perfectly recover quantum coherence by performing a measurement only on the environment, whereas for dimension $d>3$ there are situations where recovery is impossible, even with complete access to the environment. For qubits, the minimal amount of classical information to be extracted from the environment equals the entropy exchange.

Thermally induced conductance jumps of metal nanowires are modeled using stochastic Ginzburg-Landau field theories. Changes in radius are predicted to occur via the nucleation of surface kinks at the wire ends, consistent with recent electron microscopy studies. The activation rate displays nontrivial dependence on nanowire length, and undergoes first- or second-order-like transitions as a function of length. The activation barriers of the most stable structures are predicted to be universal, i.e., independent of the radius of the wire, and proportional to the square root of the surface tension. The reduction of the activation barrier under strain is also determined.

The four-body problem for an interacting two-species Fermi gas is solved analytically in a confined quasi-one-dimensional geometry, where the two-body atom-atom scattering length $a_{\mathrm{aa}}$ displays a confinement-induced resonance. We compute the dimer-dimer scattering length $a_{\mathrm{dd}}$ and show that this quantity completely determines the many-body solution of the associated BEC-BCS crossover phenomenon in terms of bosonic dimers.

We analyze some consequences of the Casimir-type zero-point radiation pressure. These include macroscopic “vacuum” forces on a metallic layer in between a dielectric medium and an inert [$ϵ(\omega )=1$] one. Ways to control the sign of these forces, based on dielectric properties of the media, are thus suggested. Finally, the large positive Casimir pressure, due to surface plasmons on thin metallic layers, is evaluated and discussed.

It is proved that there exist subspaces of bipartite tensor product spaces that have no orthonormal bases that can be perfectly distinguished by means of local operations and classical communication. A corollary of this fact is that there exist quantum channels having suboptimal classical capacity even when the receiver may communicate classically with a third party that represents the channel’s environment.

We present a new dimensional scaling transformation of the Schrödinger equation for the two electron bond. This yields, for the first time, a good description of the bond via $D$ scaling. There also emerges, in the large-$D$ limit, an intuitively appealing semiclassical picture, akin to a molecular model proposed by Bohr in 1913. In this limit, the electrons are confined to specific orbits in the scaled space, yet the uncertainty principle is maintained. A first-order perturbation correction, proportional to $1/D$, substantially improves the agreement with the exact ground state potential energy curve. The present treatment is very simple mathematically, yet provides a strikingly accurate description of the potential curves for the lowest singlet, triplet, and excited states of ${\mathrm{H}}_2$. We find the modified $D$-scaling method also gives good results for other molecules. It can be combined advantageously with Hartree-Fock and other conventional methods.

The ground-state energies and pairing gaps in dilute superfluid Fermi gases have now been calculated with the quantum Monte Carlo method without detailed knowledge of their wave functions. However, such knowledge is essential to predict other properties of these gases such as density matrices and pair distribution functions. We present a new and simple method to optimize the wave functions of quantum fluids using the Green’s function Monte Carlo method. It is used to calculate the pair distribution functions and potential energies of Fermi gases over the entire regime from atomic Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer superfluid to molecular Bose-Einstein condensation, spanned as the interaction strength is varied.

We propose a new approach to quantum phase gates via the adiabatic evolution. The conditional phase shift is neither of dynamical nor geometric origin. It arises from the adiabatic evolution of the dark state itself. Taking advantage of the adiabatic passage, this kind of quantum logic gates is robust against moderate fluctuations of experimental parameters. In comparison with the geometric phase gates, it is unnecessary to drive the system to undergo a desired cyclic evolution to obtain a desired solid angle. Thus, the procedure is simplified, and the fidelity may be further improved since the errors in obtaining the required solid angle are avoided. We illustrate such a kind of quantum logic gates in the ion trap system. The idea can also be realized in other systems, opening a new perspective for quantum information processing.

With a combination of the quantum repeater and the cluster state approaches, we show that efficient quantum computation can be constructed even if all the entangling quantum gates only succeed with an arbitrarily small probability $p$. The required computational overhead scales efficiently both with $1/p$ and $n$, where $n$ is the number of qubits in the computation. This approach provides an efficient way to combat noise in a class of quantum computation implementation schemes, where the dominant noise leads to probabilistic signaled errors with an error probability $1-p$ far beyond any threshold requirement.

In this Letter, we construct the quantum algorithms for the Simon problem and the period-finding problem, which do not require initializing the auxiliary qubits involved in the process of functional evaluation but are as efficient as the original algorithms. In these quantum algorithms, one can use any arbitrarily mixed state as the auxiliary qubits, and furthermore can recover the state of the auxiliary qubits to the original one after completing the computations. Since the recovered state can be employed in any other computations, we obtain that a single preparation of the auxiliary qubits in an arbitrarily mixed state is sufficient to implement the iterative procedure in the Simon algorithm or the period-finding algorithm.

We investigate a general class of quantum key distribution (QKD) protocols using one-way classical communication. We show that full security can be proven by considering only collective attacks. We derive computable lower and upper bounds on the secret-key rate of those QKD protocols involving only entropies of two-qubit density operators. As an illustration of our results, we determine new bounds for the Bennett-Brassard 1984, the 6-state, and the Bennett 1992 protocols. We show that in all these cases the first classical processing that the legitimate partners should apply consists in adding noise.

Using space-time resolved solutions to relativistic quantum field theory, we analyze the electron-positron creation process from vacuum in the long-time regime in which multiple pairs are produced. We find that for a supercritical potential of finite extension, the time dependence of the production rate of pairs is described by four distinct regimes that have their direct counterparts in the time evolved spatial density of the particles. These regimes include the shape-invariant birth process, an entanglement-induced reduction of interference, a recurrent Pauli suppression of pair production induced by electron-potential scattering, and finally a production halt associated with a population of supercritical and a partial population of subcritical bound states.

We investigate theoretically fermionic superfluidity induced by Feshbach resonance in the orbital $p$-wave channel and determine the general phase diagram. In contrast with superfluid ${}^3\mathrm{He}$, due to the dipole interaction, the pairing is extremely anisotropic. When this dipole interaction is relatively strong, the pairing has symmetry $k_z$. When it is relatively weak, it is of symmetry $k_z+i\beta k_y$ (up to a rotation about $\widehat{z}$, here $\beta <1$). A phase transition between these two states can occur under a change in the magnetic field or the density of the gas.