## Physics

### Evaluating Performance of Photon-Number-Resolving Detectors. (arXiv:1812.05422v1 [quant-ph])

arXiv.org: Quantum Physics - Fri, 2018-12-14 22:03

We analyze the performance of photon-number-resolving (PNR) detectors and introduce a figure of merit for the accuracy of such detectors. This figure of merit is the (worst-case) probability that the photon-number-resolving detector correctly predicts the input photon number. Simulations of various PNR detectors based on multiplexed single-photon `click detectors' is performed. We conclude that the required quantum efficiency is very high in order to achieve even moderate (up to a handful) photon resolution, we derive the required quantum efficiency as a function of the the maximal photon number one wants to resolve, and we show that the number of click detectors required grows quadratically with the maximal number of photons resolvable.

Categories: Journals, Physics

### Three-Level Landau-Zener Dynamics. (arXiv:1812.05474v1 [quant-ph])

arXiv.org: Quantum Physics - Fri, 2018-12-14 22:03

We compute Landau-Zener probabilities for 3-level systems with a linear sweep of the uncoupled energy levels of the 3$\times$3 Hamiltonian $H(t)$. Two symmetry classes of Hamiltonians are studied: For $H(t) \in$ su(2) (expressible as a linear combination of the three spin 1 matrices), an analytic solution to the problem is obtained in terms of the parabolic cylinder $D$ functions. For $H(t) \in$ su(3) (expressible as a linear combination of the eight Gell-Mann matrices), numerical solutions are obtained. In the adiabatic regime, full population transfer is obtained asymptotically at large time, but at intermediate times, all three levels are populated and St\"uckelberg oscillations are typically manifest. 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 St\"uckelberg oscillations are suppressed and that the temporal decay law of the population probabilities is not a simple exponential.

Categories: Journals, Physics

### Transmission in Graphene through Time-oscillating Linear Barrier. (arXiv:1812.05500v1 [cond-mat.mes-hall])

arXiv.org: Quantum Physics - Fri, 2018-12-14 22:03

Transmission probabilities of Dirac fermions in graphene under linear barrier potential oscillating in time is investigated. Solving Dirac equation we end up with the solutions of the energy spectrum depending on several modes coming from the oscillations. These will be used to obtain a transfer matrix that allows to determine transmission amplitudes of all modes. Due to numerical difficulties in truncating the resulting coupled channel equations, we limit ourselves to low quantum channels, i.e. $l = 0, \pm1$, and study the three corresponding transmission probabilities.

Categories: Journals, Physics

### Probing multiple-frequency atom-photon interactions with ultracold atoms. (arXiv:1812.05545v1 [cond-mat.quant-gas])

arXiv.org: Quantum Physics - Fri, 2018-12-14 22:03

We dress atoms with multiple-radiofrequency fields and investigate the spectrum of transitions driven by an additional probe field. A complete theoretical description of this rich spectrum is presented, in which we find allowed transitions and determine their amplitudes using the resolvent formalism. Experimentally, we observe transitions up to sixth order in the probe field using radiofrequency spectroscopy of Bose-Einstein condensates trapped in single- and multiple-radiofrequency-dressed potentials. We find excellent agreement between theory and experiment, including the prediction and verification of previously unobserved transitions, even in the single-radiofrequency case.

Categories: Journals, Physics

### QBism and the Ithaca Desiderata. (arXiv:1812.05549v1 [quant-ph])

arXiv.org: Quantum Physics - Fri, 2018-12-14 22:03

In 1996, N. David Mermin proposed a set of desiderata for an understanding of quantum mechanics, the "Ithaca Interpretation". In 2012, Mermin became a public advocate of QBism, an interpretation due to Christopher Fuchs and Ruediger Schack. Here, we evaluate QBism with respect to the Ithaca Interpretation's six desiderata, in the process also evaluating those desiderata themselves. This analysis reveals a genuine distinction between QBism and the IIQM, but also a natural progression from one to the other.

Categories: Journals, Physics

### Emergent SU(2) dynamics and perfect quantum many-body scars. (arXiv:1812.05561v1 [quant-ph])

arXiv.org: Quantum Physics - Fri, 2018-12-14 22:03

Motivated by recent experimental observations of coherent many-body revivals in a constrained Rydberg atom chain, we construct a weak quasi-local deformation of the Rydberg blockade Hamiltonian, which makes the revivals virtually perfect. Our analysis suggests the existence of an underlying non-integrable Hamiltonian which supports an emergent SU(2)-spin dynamics within a small subspace of the many-body Hilbert space. We show that such perfect dynamics necessitates the existence of atypical, nonergodic energy eigenstates - quantum many-body scars. Furthermore, using these insights, we construct a toy model that hosts exact quantum many-body scars, providing an intuitive explanation of their origin. Our results offer specific routes to enhancing coherent many-body revivals, and provide a step towards establishing the stability of quantum many-body scars in the thermodynamic limit.

Categories: Journals, Physics

### Reduced Density-Matrix Approach to Strong Matter-Photon Interaction. (arXiv:1812.05562v1 [quant-ph])

arXiv.org: Quantum Physics - Fri, 2018-12-14 22:03

In this work, we present a first-principles approach to electronic many-body systems strongly coupled to cavity modes in terms of matter-photon reduced density matrices. The theory is fundamentally non-perturbative and thus captures not only the effects of correlated electronic systems but accounts also for strong interactions between matter and photon egrees of freedom. We do so by introducing a higher-dimensional auxiliary system that maps the coupled fermion-boson system to a purely fermionic problem as proposed recently in the context of density-functional theory (arXiv:1812.00388(N)). This reformulation allows us to overcome many fundamental challenges of density-matrix theory in the context of coupled fermion-boson systems and we can employ conventional reduced density-matrix functional theory developed for purely fermionic systems. We provide results for model systems in real space and show that simple density-matrix approximations are accurate from the weak to the deep-strong coupling regime.

Categories: Journals, Physics

### Asymmetric butterfly velocities in Hamiltonian and circuit models. (arXiv:1812.05589v1 [cond-mat.stat-mech])

arXiv.org: Quantum Physics - Fri, 2018-12-14 22:03

The butterfly velocity $v_B$ has been proposed as a characteristic velocity for information propagation in local systems. It can be measured by the ballistic spreading of local operators in time (or, equivalently, by out-of-time-ordered commutators). In general, this velocity can depend on the direction of spreading and, indeed, the asymmetry between different directions can be made arbitrarily large using arbitrarily deep quantum circuits. Nevertheless, in almost all examples of local time-independent Hamiltonians that have been examined thus far, this velocity is independent of the direction of information propagation. In this work, we present two models with asymmetric $v_B$. The first is a time-independent Hamiltonian in one dimension with local, 3-site interactions. The second is a class of local unitary circuits, which we call $n$-staircases, where $n$ serves as a tunable parameter interpolating from $n=1$ with symmetric spreading to $n=\infty$ with completely chiral information propagation.

Categories: Journals, Physics

### Analytic solution and pulse area theorem for three-level atoms. (arXiv:1704.02398v2 [quant-ph] UPDATED)

arXiv.org: Quantum Physics - Fri, 2018-12-14 22:03

We report an analytic solution for a three-level atom driven by arbitrary time-dependent electromagnetic pulses. In particular, we consider far-detuned driving pulses and show an excellent match between our analytic result and the numerical simulations. We use our solution to derive a pulse area theorem for three--level $V$ and $\Lambda$ systems without making the rotating wave approximation. Formulated as an energy conservation law, this pulse area theorem provides a simple picture for a pulse propagation through a three--level media.

Categories: Journals, Physics

### A cosmological open quantum system. (arXiv:1708.00493v4 [hep-th] UPDATED)

arXiv.org: Quantum Physics - Fri, 2018-12-14 22:03

We derive the evolution equation for the density matrix of a UV- and IR- limited band of comoving momentum modes of the canonically normalized scalar degree of freedom in two examples of nearly de Sitter universes. Including the effects of a cubic interaction term from the gravitational action and tracing out a set of longer wavelength modes, we find that the evolution of the system is non-Hamiltonian and non-Markovian. We find linear dissipation terms for a few modes with wavelength near the boundary between system and bath and nonlinear dissipation terms for all modes. The non-Hamiltonian terms persist to late times when the scalar field dynamics is such that the curvature perturbation continues to evolve on super-Hubble scales.

Categories: Journals, Physics

### Compact Neural Networks based on the Multiscale Entanglement Renormalization Ansatz. (arXiv:1711.03357v3 [cs.NE] UPDATED)

arXiv.org: Quantum Physics - Fri, 2018-12-14 22:03

This paper demonstrates a method for tensorizing neural networks based upon an efficient way of approximating scale invariant quantum states, the Multi-scale Entanglement Renormalization Ansatz (MERA). We employ MERA as a replacement for the fully connected layers in a convolutional neural network and test this implementation on the CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 datasets. The proposed method outperforms factorization using tensor trains, providing greater compression for the same level of accuracy and greater accuracy for the same level of compression. We demonstrate MERA layers with 14000 times fewer parameters and a reduction in accuracy of less than 1% compared to the equivalent fully connected layers, scaling like O(N).

Categories: Journals, Physics

### Three Qubit Randomized Benchmarking. (arXiv:1712.06550v2 [quant-ph] UPDATED)

arXiv.org: Quantum Physics - Fri, 2018-12-14 22:03

As quantum circuits increase in size, it is critical to establish scalable multiqubit fidelity metrics. Here we investigate three-qubit randomized benchmarking (RB) with fixed-frequency transmon qubits coupled to a common bus with pairwise microwave-activated interactions (cross-resonance). We measure, for the first time, a three-qubit error per Clifford of 0.106 for all-to-all gate connectivity and 0.207 for linear gate connectivity. Furthermore, by introducing mixed dimensionality simultaneous RB --- simultaneous one- and two-qubit RB --- we show that the three-qubit errors can be predicted from the one- and two-qubit errors. However, by introducing certain coherent errors to the gates we can increase the three-qubit error to 0.302, an increase that is not predicted by a proportionate increase in the one- and two-qubit errors from simultaneous RB. This demonstrates three-qubit RB as a unique multiqubit metric.

Categories: Journals, Physics

### Gaps in the spectrum of a cuboidal periodic lattice graph. (arXiv:1801.02572v3 [math-ph] UPDATED)

arXiv.org: Quantum Physics - Fri, 2018-12-14 22:03

We locate gaps in the spectrum of a Hamiltonian on a periodic cuboidal (and generally hyperrectangular) lattice graph with $\delta$ couplings in the vertices. We formulate sufficient conditions under which the number of gaps is finite. As the main result, we find a connection between the arrangement of the gaps and the coefficients in a continued fraction associated with the ratio of edge lengths of the lattice. This knowledge enables a straightforward construction of a periodic quantum graph with any required number of spectral gaps and---to some degree---to control their positions; i.e., to partially solve the inverse spectral problem.

Categories: Journals, Physics

### Mapping Twisted Light into and out of a Photonic Chip. (arXiv:1805.00516v2 [quant-ph] UPDATED)

arXiv.org: Quantum Physics - Fri, 2018-12-14 22:03

Twisted light carrying orbital angular momentum (OAM) provides an additional degree of freedom for modern optics and an emerging resource for both classical and quantum information technologies. Its inherently infinite dimensions can potentially be exploited by using mode multiplexing to enhance data capacity for sustaining the unprecedented growth in big data and internet traffic, and can be encoded to build large-scale quantum computing machines in high-dimensional Hilbert space. While the emission of twisted light from the surface of integrated devices to free space has been widely investigated, the transmission and processing inside a photonic chip remain to be addressed. Here, we present the first laser-direct-written waveguide being capable of supporting OAM modes and experimentally demonstrate a faithful mapping of twisted light into and out of a photonic chip. The states OAM$_{0}$, OAM$_{-1}$, OAM$_{+1}$ and their superpositions can transmit through the photonic chip with a total efficiency up to 60% with minimal crosstalk. In addition, we present the transmission of quantum twisted light states of single photons and measure the output states with single-photon imaging. Our results may add OAM as a new degree of freedom to be transmitted and manipulated in a photonic chip for high-capacity communication and high-dimensional quantum information processing.

Categories: Journals, Physics

### Hermite polynomials and Fibonacci Oscillators. (arXiv:1805.03229v2 [cond-mat.stat-mech] UPDATED)

arXiv.org: Quantum Physics - Fri, 2018-12-14 22:03

We compute the ($q_1,q_2$)-deformed Hermite polynomials by replacing the quantum harmonic oscillator problem to Fibonacci oscillators. We do this by applying the ($q_1, q_2$)-extension of Jackson derivative. The deformed energy spectrum is also found in terms of these parameters. We conclude that the deformation is more effective in higher excited states. We conjecture that this achievement may find applications in the inclusion of disorder and impurity in quantum systems. The ordinary quantum mechanics is easily recovered as $q_1 = 1$ and $q_2\to1$ or vice versa.

Categories: Journals, Physics

### Bayesian estimation for quantum sensing in the absence of single-shot detection. (arXiv:1806.01249v2 [quant-ph] UPDATED)

arXiv.org: Quantum Physics - Fri, 2018-12-14 22:03

Quantum information protocols, such as quantum error correction and quantum phase estimation, have been widely used to enhance the performance of quantum sensors. While these protocols have relied on single-shot detection, in most practical applications only an averaged readout is available, as in the case of room-temperature sensing with the electron spin associated with a nitrogen-vacancy center in diamond. Here, we theoretically investigate the application of the quantum phase estimation algorithm for high dynamic-range magnetometry, in the case where single-shot readout is not available. We show that, even in this case, Bayesian estimation provides a natural way to use the available information in an efficient way. We apply Bayesian analysis to achieve an optimized sensing protocol for estimating a time-independent magnetic field with a single electron spin associated to a nitrogen-vacancy center at room temperature and show that this protocol improves the sensitivity over previous protocols by more than a factor of 3. Moreover, we show that an extra enhancement can be achieved by considering the timing information in the detector clicks.

Categories: Journals, Physics

### Entanglement and Entropy in Electron-Electron Scattering. (arXiv:1807.04694v2 [quant-ph] UPDATED)

arXiv.org: Quantum Physics - Fri, 2018-12-14 22:03

Treating Coulomb scattering of two free electrons in a stationary approach, we explore the momentum and spin entanglement created by the interaction. We show that a particular discretisation provides an estimate of the von Neumann entropy of the one-electron reduced density matrix from the experimentally accessible Shannon entropy. For spinless distinguishable electrons the entropy is sizeable at low energies, indicating strong momentum entanglement, and drops to almost zero at energies of the order of 10 keV when the azimutal degree of freedom is integrated out, i.e. practically no entanglement and almost pure one-electron states. If spin is taken into account, the entropy for electrons with antiparallel spins should be larger than in the parallel-spin case, since it embodies both momentum and spin entanglement. Surprisingly, this difference, as well as the deviation from the spin-less case, is extremely small for the complete scattering state. Strong spin entanglement can however be obtained by post-selecting states at scattering angle pi/2.

Categories: Journals, Physics

### Coherent manipulation of a three-dimensional maximally entangled state. (arXiv:1807.07257v2 [quant-ph] UPDATED)

arXiv.org: Quantum Physics - Fri, 2018-12-14 22:03

Maximally entangled photon pairs with a spatial degree of freedom is a potential way for realizing high-capacity quantum computing and communication. However, methods to generate such entangled states with high quality, high brightness, and good controllability are needed. Here, a scheme is experimentally demonstrated that generates spatially maximally entangled photon pairs with an orbital angular momentum degree of freedom via spontaneous parametric down-conversion in a nonlinear crystal. Compared with existing methods using post-selection, the technique can directly modulate the spatial spectrum of down-converted photon pairs by engineering the input pump beam. In addition, the relative phase between spatially entangled photon pairs can be easily manipulated by preparing the relative phase of input pump states.

Categories: Journals, Physics

### Scalar and fermionic Unruh Otto engines. (arXiv:1808.01068v2 [quant-ph] UPDATED)

arXiv.org: Quantum Physics - Fri, 2018-12-14 22:03

We investigate the behaviour of quantum heat engines, in which a qubit is put through the quantum equivalent of the Otto cycle and the heat reservoirs are due to the Unruh effect. The qubit is described by an Unruh--DeWitt detector model coupled quadratically to a scalar field and alternately to a fermion field. In the cycle, the qubit undergoes two stages of differing constant acceleration corresponding to thermal contact with a hot and cold reservoir. Explicit conditions are derived on the accelerations required for this cycle to have positive work output. By analytically calculating the detector response functions, we show that the dimensionality of the quadratic and fermionic coupling constants introduces qualitatively different behaviour of the work output from this cycle as compared to the case in which the qubit linearly couples to a scalar field.

Categories: Journals, Physics

### Bulk locality and cooperative flows. (arXiv:1808.05313v2 [hep-th] UPDATED)

arXiv.org: Quantum Physics - Fri, 2018-12-14 22:03

We use the 'bit thread' formulation of holographic entanglement entropy to highlight the distinction between the universally-valid strong subadditivity and the more restrictive relation called monogamy of mutual information (MMI), known to hold for geometrical states (i.e. states of holographic theories with gravitational duals describing a classical bulk geometry). In particular, we provide a novel proof of MMI, using bit threads directly. To this end, we present an explicit geometrical construction of cooperative flows which we build out of disjoint thread bundles. We conjecture that our method applies in a wide class of configurations, including ones with non-trivial topology, causal structure, and time dependence. The explicit nature of the construction reveals that MMI is more deeply rooted in bulk locality than is the case for strong subadditivity.

Categories: Journals, Physics