arXiv subjects

Peter Zoller

Publications and source records attributed to Peter Zoller.

At least 91 records · Page 5Linked to original sources

arXiv2018

Quantum Scanning Microscope for Cold Atoms

We present a detailed theoretical description of an atomic scanning microscope in a cavity QED setup proposed in Phys. Rev. Lett. 120, 133601 (2018). The microscope continuously observes atomic densities with optical subwavelength resolution in a nondestructive way. The super-resolution is achieved by engineering an internal atomic dark state with a sharp spatial variation of population of a ground level dispersively coupled to the cavity field. Thus, the atomic position encoded in the internal state is revealed as a phase shift of the light reflected from the cavity in a homodyne experiment. Our theoretical description of the microscope operation is based on the stochastic master equation describing the conditional time evolution of the atomic system under continuous observation as a competition between dynamics induced by the Hamiltonian of the system, decoherence effects due to atomic spontaneous decay, and the measurement backaction. Within our approach we relate the observed homodyne current with a local atomic density, and discuss the emergence of a quantum nondemolition measurement regime allowing continuous observation of spatial densities of quantum motional eigenstates without measurement backaction in a single experimental run.

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arXiv2018

Theory of a Quantum Scanning Microscope for Cold Atoms

We propose and analyze a scanning microscope to monitor `live' the quantum dynamics of cold atoms in a Cavity QED setup. The microscope measures the atomic density with subwavelength resolution via dispersive couplings to a cavity and homodyne detection within the framework of continuous measurement theory. We analyze two modes of operation. First, for a fixed focal point the microscope records the wave packet dynamics of atoms with time resolution set by the cavity lifetime. Second, a spatial scan of the microscope acts to map out the spatial density of stationary quantum states. Remarkably, in the latter case, for a good cavity limit, the microscope becomes an effective quantum non-demolition (QND) device, such that the spatial distribution of motional eigenstates can be measured back-action free in single scans, as an emergent QND measurement.

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arXiv2018

Rényi Entropies from Random Quenches in Atomic Hubbard and Spin Models

We present a scheme for measuring Rényi entropies in generic atomic Hubbard and spin models using single copies of a quantum state and for partitions in arbitrary spatial dimension. Our approach is based on the generation of random unitaries from random quenches, implemented using engineered time-dependent disorder potentials, and standard projective measurements, as realized by quantum gas microscopes. By analyzing the properties of the generated unitaries and the role of statistical errors, with respect to the size of the partition, we show that the protocol can be realized in exisiting AMO quantum simulators, and used to measure for instance area law scaling of entanglement in two-dimensional spin models or the entanglement growth in many-body localized systems.

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arXiv2017

Dark state optical lattice with sub-wavelength spatial structure

We report on the experimental realization of a conservative optical lattice for cold atoms with sub-wavelength spatial structure. The potential is based on the nonlinear optical response of three-level atoms in laser-dressed dark states, which is not constrained by the diffraction limit of the light generating the potential. The lattice consists of a 1D array of ultra-narrow barriers with widths less than 10~nm, well below the wavelength of the lattice light, physically realizing a Kronig-Penney potential. We study the band structure and dissipation of this lattice, and find good agreement with theoretical predictions. The observed lifetimes of atoms trapped in the lattice are as long as 60 ms, nearly $10^5$ times the excited state lifetime, and could be further improved with more laser intensity. The potential is readily generalizable to higher dimension and different geometries, allowing, for example, nearly perfect box traps, narrow tunnel junctions for atomtronics applications, and dynamically generated lattices with sub-wavelength spacings.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗

arXiv2017

Delayed Coherent Quantum Feedback from a Scattering Theory and a Matrix Product State Perspective

We study the scattering of photons propagating in a semi-infinite waveguide terminated by a mirror and interacting with a quantum emitter. This paradigm constitutes an example of coherent quantum feedback, where light emitted towards the mirror gets redirected back to the emitter. We derive an analytical solution for the scattering of two-photon states, which is based on an exact resummation of the perturbative expansion of the scattering matrix, in a regime where the time delay of the coherent feedback is comparable to the timescale of the quantum emitter's dynamics. We compare the results with numerical simulations based on matrix product state techniques simulating the full dynamics of the system, and extend the study to the scattering of coherent states beyond the low-power limit.

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arXiv2017

Analog Quantum Simulation of (1+1)D Lattice QED with Trapped Ions

The prospect of quantum simulating lattice gauge theories opens exciting possibilities for understanding fundamental forms of matter. Here, we show that trapped ions represent a promising platform in this context when simultaneously exploiting internal pseudo-spins and external phonon vibrations. We illustrate our ideas with two complementary proposals for simulating lattice-regularized quantum electrodynamics (QED) in (1+1) space-time dimensions. The first scheme replaces the gauge fields by local vibrations with a high occupation number. By numerical finite-size scaling, we demonstrate that this model recovers Wilson's lattice gauge theory in a controlled way. Its implementation can be scaled up to tens of ions in an array of micro-traps. The second scheme represents the gauge fields by spins 1/2, and thus simulates a quantum link model. As we show, this allows the fermionic matter to be replaced by bosonic degrees of freedom, permitting small-scale implementations in a linear Paul trap. Both schemes work on energy scales significantly larger than typical decoherence rates in experiments, thus enabling the investigation of phenomena such as string breaking, Coleman's quantum phase transition, and false-vacuum decay. The underlying ideas of the proposed analog simulation schemes may also be adapted to other platforms, such as superconducting qubits.

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arXiv2017

Photonic Band Structure of Two-dimensional Atomic Lattices

Two-dimensional atomic arrays exhibit a number of intriguing quantum optical phenomena, including subradiance, nearly perfect reflection of radiation and long-lived topological edge states. Studies of emission and scattering of photons in such lattices require complete treatment of the radiation pattern from individual atoms, including long-range interactions. We describe a systematic approach to perform the calculations of collective energy shifts and decay rates in the presence of such long-range interactions for arbitrary two-dimensional atomic lattices. As applications of our method, we investigate the topological properties of atomic lattices both in free-space and near plasmonic surfaces.

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arXiv2017

Topological Quantum Optics in Two-Dimensional Atomic Arrays

We demonstrate that two-dimensional atomic emitter arrays with subwavelength spacing constitute topologically protected quantum optical systems where the photon propagation is robust against large imperfections while losses associated with free space emission are strongly suppressed. Breaking time-reversal symmetry with a magnetic field results in gapped photonic bands with non-trivial Chern numbers and topologically protected, long-lived edge states. Due to the inherent nonlinearity of constituent emitters, such systems provide a platform for exploring quantum optical analogues of interacting topological systems.

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arXiv2017

Quantum Simulation and Spectroscopy of Entanglement Hamiltonians

Entanglement is central to our understanding of many-body quantum matter. In particular, the entanglement spectrum, as eigenvalues of the reduced density matrix of a subsystem, provides a unique footprint of properties of strongly correlated quantum matter from detection of topological order to characterisation of quantum critical systems. However, direct experimental measurement of the entanglement spectrum has so far remained elusive due to lack of direct experimental probes. Here we show that the entanglement spectrum of the ground state of a broad class of Hamiltonians becomes directly accessible as quantum simulation and spectroscopy of an entanglement Hamil- tonian, building on the Bisognano-Wichmann (BW) theorem of axiomatic quantum field theory. Remarkably, this theorem gives an explicit physical construction of the entanglement Hamiltonian, identified as Hamiltonian of the many-body system of interest with spatially varying couplings. Building on this, we propose an immediate, scalable recipe for implementation of the entanglement Hamiltonian, and measurement of the corresponding entanglement spectrum as spectroscopy of the Bisognano-Wichmann Hamiltonian with synthetic quantum systems, including atoms in optical lat- tices and trapped ions. We illustrate and benchmark this scenario on a variety of models, spanning phenomena as diverse as conformal field theories, topological order, and quantum phase transitions.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2017

Quantum State Transfer via Noisy Photonic and Phononic Waveguides

We describe a quantum state transfer protocol, where a quantum state of photons stored in a first cavity can be faithfully transferred to a second distant cavity via an infinite 1D waveguide, while being immune to arbitrary noise (e.g. thermal noise) injected into the waveguide. We extend the model and protocol to a cavity QED setup, where atomic ensembles, or single atoms representing quantum memory, are coupled to a cavity mode. We present a detailed study of sensitivity to imperfections, and develop a quantum error correction protocol to account for random losses (or additions) of photons in the waveguide. Our numerical analysis is enabled by Matrix Product State techniques to simulate the complete quantum circuit, which we generalize to include thermal input fields. Our discussion applies both to photonic and phononic quantum networks.

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arXiv2017

Helical Floquet Channels in 1D Lattices

We show how dispersionless channels exhibiting perfect spin-momentum locking can arise in a 1D lattice model. While such spectra are forbidden by fermion doubling in static 1D systems, here we demonstrate their appearance in the stroboscopic dynamics of a periodically driven system. Remarkably, this phenomenon does not rely on any adiabatic assumptions, in contrast to the well known Thouless pump and related models of adiabatic spin pumps. The proposed setup is shown to be experimentally feasible with state of the art techniques used to control ultracold alkaline earth atoms in optical lattices.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗

arXiv2017

Photonic tensor networks produced by a single quantum emitter

We propose and analyze a protocol to generate two dimensional tensor network states using a single quantum system that sequentially interacts with a 1D string of qubits. This is accomplished by using parts of the string itself as a quantum queue memory. As a physical implementation, we consider a single atom or atom like system coupled to a 1D waveguide with a distant mirror, where guided photons represent the qubits while the mirror allows the implementation of the queue memory. We identify the class of many-body quantum states that can be produced using this approach. These include universal resources for measurement based quantum computation and states associated with topologically ordered phases. We discuss an explicit protocol to deterministically create a 2D cluster state in a quantum nanophotonic experiment, that allows for a realization of a quantum computer using a single atom coupled to light.

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arXiv2016

U(1) Wilson lattice gauge theories in digital quantum simulators

Lattice gauge theories describe fundamental phenomena in nature, but calculating their real-time dynamics on classical computers is notoriously difficult. In a recent publication [Nature 534, 516 (2016)], we proposed and experimentally demonstrated a digital quantum simulation of the paradigmatic Schwinger model, a U(1)-Wilson lattice gauge theory describing the interplay between fermionic matter and gauge bosons. Here, we provide a detailed theoretical analysis of the performance and the potential of this protocol. Our strategy is based on analytically integrating out the gauge bosons, which preserves exact gauge invariance but results in complicated long-range interactions between the matter fields. Trapped-ion platforms are naturally suited to implementing these interactions, allowing for an efficient quantum simulation of the model, with a number of gate operations that scales only polynomially with system size. Employing numerical simulations, we illustrate that relevant phenomena can be observed in larger experimental systems, using as an example the production of particle--antiparticle pairs after a quantum quench. We investigate theoretically the robustness of the scheme towards generic error sources, and show that near-future experiments can reach regimes where finite-size effects are insignificant. We also discuss the challenges in quantum simulating the continuum limit of the theory. Using our scheme, fundamental phenomena of lattice gauge theories can be probed using a broad set of experimentally accessible observables, including the entanglement entropy and the vacuum persistence amplitude.

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arXiv2016

Measurement Protocol for the Entanglement Spectrum of Cold Atoms

Entanglement, and, in particular the entanglement spectrum, plays a major role in characterizing many-body quantum systems. While there has been a surge of theoretical works on the subject, no experimental measurement has been performed to date because of the lack of an implementable measurement scheme. Here, we propose a measurement protocol to access the entanglement spectrum of many-body states in experiments with cold atoms in optical lattices. Our scheme effectively performs a Ramsey spectroscopy of the entanglement Hamiltonian and is based on the ability to produce several copies of the state under investigation together with the possibility to perform a global swap gate between two copies conditioned on the state of an auxiliary qubit. We show how the required conditional swap gate can be implemented with cold atoms, either by using Rydberg interactions or coupling the atoms to a cavity mode. We illustrate these ideas on a simple (extended) Bose-Hubbard model where such a measurement protocol reveals topological features of the Haldane phase.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗

arXiv2016

A Coherent Quantum Annealer with Rydberg Atoms

There is a significant ongoing effort in realizing quantum annealing with different physical platforms. The challenge is to achieve a fully programmable quantum device featuring coherent adiabatic quantum dynamics. Here we show that combining the well-developed quantum simulation toolbox for Rydberg atoms with the recently proposed Lechner-Hauke-Zoller~(LHZ) architecture allows one to build a prototype for a coherent adiabatic quantum computer with all-to-all Ising interactions and, therefore, a novel platform for quantum annealing. In LHZ a infinite-range spin-glass is mapped onto the low energy subspace of a spin-1/2 lattice gauge model with quasi-local 4-body parity constraints. This spin model can be emulated in a natural way with Rubidium and Cesium atoms in a bipartite optical lattice involving laser-dressed Rydberg-Rydberg interactions, which are several orders of magnitude larger than the relevant decoherence rates. This makes the exploration of coherent quantum enhanced optimization protocols accessible with state-of-the-art atomic physics experiments.

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arXiv2016

Chiral quantum optics with V-level atoms and coherent quantum feedback

We study the dissipative dynamics of an atom in a V-level configuration driven by lasers and coupled to a semi-infinite waveguide. The coupling to the waveguide is chiral, in that each transition interacts only with the modes propagating in a given direction, and this direction is opposite for the two transitions. The waveguide is terminated by a mirror which coherently feeds the photon stream emitted by one transition back to the atom. First, we are interested in the dynamics of the atom in the Markovian limit where the time-delay in the feedback is negligible. Specifically, we study the conditions under which the atom evolves towards a pure "dark" stationary state, where the photons emitted by both transitions interfere destructively thanks to the coherent feedback, and the overall emission vanishes. This is a single-atom analog of the quantum dimer, where a pair of laser-driven two-level atoms is coupled to a unidirectional waveguide and dissipates towards a pure entangled dark state. Our setup should be feasible with current state-of-the-art experiments. Second, we extend our study to non-Markovian regimes and investigate the effect of the feedback retardation on the steady-state.

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arXiv2016

Dynamical Buildup of a Quantized Hall Response from Non-Topological States

We consider a two-dimensional system initialized in a topologically trivial state before its Hamiltonian is ramped through a phase transition into a Chern insulator regime. This scenario is motivated by current experiments with ultracold atomic gases aimed at realizing time-dependent dynamics in topological insulators. Our main findings are twofold. First, considering coherent dynamics, the non-equilibrium Hall response is found to approach a topologically quantized time averaged value in the limit of slow but non-adiabatic parameter ramps, even though the Chern number of the state remains trivial. Second, adding dephasing, the destruction of quantum coherence is found to stabilize this Hall response, while the Chern number generically becomes undefined. We provide a geometric picture of this phenomenology in terms of the time-dependent Berry curvature.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗

arXiv2016

Chiral Quantum Optics

At the most fundamental level, the interaction between light and matter is manifested by the emission and absorption of single photons by single quantum emitters. Controlling light--matter interaction is the basis for diverse applications ranging from light technology to quantum--information processing. Many of these applications are nowadays based on photonic nanostructures strongly benefitting from their scalability and integrability. The confinement of light in such nanostructures imposes an inherent link between the local polarization and propagation direction of light. This leads to {\em chiral light--matter interaction}, i.e., the emission and absorption of photons depend on the propagation direction and local polarization of light as well as the polarization of the emitter transition. The burgeoning research field of {\em chiral quantum optics} offers fundamentally new functionalities and applications both for single emitters and ensembles thereof. For instance, a chiral light--matter interface enables the realization of integrated non--reciprocal single--photon devices and deterministic spin--photon interfaces. Moreover, engineering directional photonic reservoirs opens new avenues for constructing complex quantum circuits and networks, which may be applied to simulate a new class of quantum many--body systems.

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