arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to L. -M. Duan.
We propose a scheme to perform probabilistic quantum gates on remote trapped atom qubits through interference of optical frequency qubits. The method does not require localization of the atoms to the Lamb-Dicke limit, and is not sensitive to interferometer phase instabilities. Such probabilistic gates can be used for scalable quantum computation.
We investigate the phase separation of resonantly interacting fermions in a trap with imbalanced spin populations, both at zero and at finite temperatures. We directly minimize the thermodynamical potential under the local density approximation instead of using the gap equation, as the latter may give unstable solutions. On the BEC side of the resonance, one may cross three different phases from the trap center to the edge; while on the BCS side or at resonance, typically only two phases show up. We compare our results with the recent experiment, and the agreement is remarkable.
We systematically study the BCS-BEC crossover and the quantum phase transition in ultracold 6Li and 40K atoms across a wide Feshbach resonance. The background scattering lengths for 6Li and 40K have opposite signs, which lead to very different behaviors for these two types of atoms. For 40K, both the two-body and the many-body calculations show that the system always has two branches of solutions: one corresponds to a deeply bound molecule state; and the other, the one accessed by the current experiments, corresponds to a weakly bound state with population always dominantly in the open channel. For 6Li, there is only a unique solution with the standard crossover from the weakly bound Cooper pairs to the deeply bound molecules as one sweeps the magnetic field through the crossover region. Because of this difference, for the experimentally accessible state of 40K, there is a quantum phase transition at zero temperature from the superfluid to the normal fermi gas at the positive detuning of the magnetic field where the s-wave scattering length passes its zero point. For 6Li, however, the system changes continuously across the zero point of the scattering length. For both types of atoms, we also give detailed comparison between the results from the two-channel and the single-channel model over the whole region of the magnetic field detuning.
We propose a scheme to implement quantum gates on any pair of trapped ions immersed in a large linear crystal, using interaction mediated by the transverse phonon modes. Compared with the conventional approaches based on the longitudinal phonon modes, this scheme is much less sensitive to ion heating and thermal motion outside of the Lamb-Dicke limit thanks to the stronger confinement in the transverse direction. The cost for such a gain is only a moderate increase of the laser power to achieve the same gate speed. We also show how to realize arbitrary-speed quantum gates with transverse phonon modes based on simple shaping of the laser pulses.
This paper has been withdrawn by the authors as the recent measurement of the closed channel population for Li6 [Partridge et al., cond-mat/0505353] indicates that the cutoff energy is still much larger than any other relevant energy scales for this broad Feshbach resonance.
Motivated by a recent experiment [Chikkatur, et al. Science, 296, 2193 (2002)] on the merging of atomic condensates, we investigate how two independent condensates with random initial phases can develop a unique relative phase when we move them together. In the adiabatic limit, the uniting of independent condensates can be understood from the eigenstate evolution of the governing Hamiltonian, which maps degenerate states (corresponding to fragmented condensates) to a single state (corresponding to a united condensate) . In the non-adiabatic limit corresponding to the practical experimental configurations, we give an explanation on why we can still get a large condensate fraction with a unique relative phase. Detailed numerical simulations are then performed for the non-adiabatic merging of the condensates, which confirm our explanation and qualitative estimation. The results may have interesting implications for realizing a continuous atom laser based on merging of condensates.
We propose a detection method for ultracold atoms which allows reconstruction of the full one-particle and two-particle correlation functions from the measurements. The method is based on Fourier sampling of the time-of-flight images through two consecutive impulsive Raman pulses. For applications of this method, we discuss a few examples, including detection of phase separation between superfluid and Mott insulators, various types of spin or superfluid orders, entanglement, exotic or fluctuating orders.
We derive the Hamiltonian for cold fermionic atoms in an optical lattice across a broad Feshbach resonance, taking into account of both multiband occupations and neighboring-site collisions. Under typical configurations, the resulting Hamiltonian can be dramatically simplified to an effective single-band model, which describes a new type of resonance between the local dressed molecules and the valence bond states of fermionic atoms at neighboring sites. On different sides of such a resonance, the effective Hamiltonian is reduced to either a t-J model for the fermionic atoms or an XXZ model for the dressed molecules. The parameters in these models are experimentally tunable in the full range, which allows for observation of various phase transitions.
We propose a scheme to implement arbitrary-speed quantum entangling gates on two trapped ions immersed in a large linear crystal of ions, with minimal control of laser beams. For gate speeds slower than the oscillation frequencies in the trap, a single appropriately-detuned laser pulse is sufficient for high-fidelity gates. For gate speeds comparable to or faster than the local ion oscillation frequency, we discover a five-pulse protocol that exploits only the local phonon modes. This points to a method for efficiently scaling the ion trap quantum computer without shuttling ions.
We investigate the dynamical response of strongly interacting ultra-cold fermionic atoms near Feshbach resonance to varying magnetic fields. Following the experimental practices, we calculate the response of the atoms to oscillating and to linearly ramped magnetic fields respectively. For oscillating magnetic fields, depending on the frequencies and the amplitudes of the oscillations, the response of the pair excitation gap shows either linear or rich non-linear behaviour. In addition, both the spectral studies through the linear response theory and the time-domain simulations suggest the existence of a resonant frequency corresponding to the pair dissociation threshold. For linearly ramped magnetic fields, the response of the excitation gap shows damped oscillations. The final value of the excitation gap depends on the rate of the field sweep.
We propose a scheme to achieve quantum computation with neutral atoms whose interactions are catalyzed by single photons. Conditional quantum gates, including an $N$-atom Toffoli gate and nonlocal gates on remote atoms, are obtained through cavity-assisted photon scattering in a manner that is robust to random variation in the atom-photon coupling rate and which does not require localization in the Lamb-Dicke regime. The dominant noise in our scheme is automatically detected for each gate operation, leading to signalled errors which do not preclude efficient quantum computation even if the error probability is close to the unity.
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.
We propose a scheme to engineer Schrödinger-cat states of propagating optical pulses. Multi-dimensional and multi-partite cat states can be generated simply by reflecting coherent optical pulses successively from a single-atom cavity. The influences of various sources of noise, including the atomic spontaneous emission and the pulse shape distortion, are characterized through detailed numerical simulation, which demonstrates practicality of this scheme within the reach of current experimental technology.
We propose a method to achieve scalable quantum computation based on fast quantum gates on an array of trapped ions, without the requirement of ion shuttling. Conditional quantum gates are obtained for any neighboring ions through spin-dependent acceleration of the ions from periodic photon kicks. The gates are shown to be robust to influence of all the other ions in the array and insensitive to the ions' temperature.
We propose a method for scaling trapped ions for large-scale quantum computation and communication based on a probabilistic ion-photon mapping. Deterministic quantum gates between remotely located trapped ions can be achieved through detection of spontaneously-emitted photons, accompanied by the local Coulomb interaction between neighboring ions. We discuss gate speeds and tolerance to experimental noise for different probabilistic entanglement schemes.
We report experimental generation of non-classically correlated photon pairs from collective emission in a room-temperature atomic vapor cell. The nonclassical feature of the emission is demonstrated by observing a violation of the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality. Each pair of correlated photons are separated by a controllable time delay up to 2 microseconds. This experiment demonstrates an important step towards the realization of the Duan-Lukin-Cirac-Zoller scheme for scalable long-distance quantum communication.
We show that ultracold atoms can be controlled in multi-band optical lattices through spatially periodic Raman pulses for investigation of a class of strongly correlated physics related to the Kondo problem. The underlying dynamics of this system is described by a spin-dependent fermionic or bosonic Kondo-Hubbard lattice model even if we have only spin-independent atomic collision interaction. We solve the bosonic Kondo-Hubbard lattice model through a mean-field approximation, and the result shows a clear phase transition from the ferromagnetic superfluid to the Kondo-signet insulator at the integer filling.
We describe a general technique that allows to induce and control strong interaction between spin states of neighboring atoms in an optical lattice. We show that the properties of spin exchange interactions, such as magnitude, sign, and anisotropy can be designed by adjusting the optical potentials. We illustrate how this technique can be used to efficiently ``engineer'' quantum spin systems with desired properties, for specific examples ranging from scalable quantum computation to probing a model with non-trivial topological orders that supports exotic non-abelian anyonic excitations.