arXiv subjects

Thomas Busch

Publications and source records attributed to Thomas Busch.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

arXiv2020

A many-body heat engine at criticality

We show that a quantum Otto cycle in which the medium, an interacting ultracold gas, is driven between a superfluid and an insulating phase can outperform similar single particle cycles. The presence of an energy gap between the two phases can be used to improve performance, while the interplay between lattice forces and the particle distribution can lead to a many-body cooperative effect. Since finite time driving of this cycle can create unwanted non-equilibrium dynamics which can significantly impair the performance of the engine cycle, we also design an approximate shortcut to adiabaticity for the many-body state that can be used to achieve an efficient Otto cycle around a critical point.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2020

Universal and optimal coin sequences for high entanglement generation in 1D discrete time quantum walks

Entanglement is a key resource in many quantum information applications and achieving high values independently of the initial conditions is an important task. Here we address the problem of generating highly entangled states in a discrete time quantum walk irrespective of the initial state using two different approaches. First, we present and analyze a deterministic sequence of coin operators which produces high values of entanglement in a universal manner for a class of localized initial states. In a second approach, we directly optimize the sequence of coin operators using a reinforcement learning algorithm. While the amount of entanglement produced by the deterministic sequence is fully independent of the initial states considered, the optimized sequences achieve in general higher average values of entanglement that do however depend on the initial state parameters. Our proposed sequence and optimization algorithm are especially useful in cases where the initial state is not fully known or entanglement has to be generated in a universal manner for a range of initial states.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2020

Optomechanical cooling by STIRAP-assisted energy transfer $:$ an alternative route towards the mechanical ground state

Standard optomechanical cooling methods ideally require weak coupling and cavity damping rates which enable the motional sidebands to be well resolved. If the coupling is too large then sideband-resolved cooling is unstable or the rotating wave approximation can become invalid. In this work we describe a protocol to cool a mechanical resonator coupled to a driven optical mode in an optomechanical cavity, which is also coupled to an optical mode in another auxiliary optical cavity, and both the cavities are frequency-modulated. We show that by modulating the amplitude of the drive as well, one can execute a type of STIRAP transfer of occupation from the mechanical mode to the lossy auxiliary optical mode which results in cooling of the mechanical mode. We show how this protocol can outperform normal optomechanical sideband cooling in various regimes such as the strong coupling and the unresolved sideband limit.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2020

A Feshbach engine in the Thomas-Fermi regime

Bose-Einstein condensates can be used to produce work by tuning the strength of the interparticle interactions with the help of Feshbach resonances. In inhomogeneous potentials, these interaction ramps change the volume of the trapped gas allowing one to create a thermodynamic cycle known as the Feshbach engine. However, in order to obtain a large power output, the engine strokes must be performed on a short timescale, which is in contrast with the fact that the efficiency of the engine is reduced by irreversible work if the strokes are done in a non-adiabatic fashion. Here we investigate how such an engine can be run in the Thomas-Fermi regime and present a shortcut to adiabaticity that minimizes the irreversible work and allows for efficient engine operation.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2020

In situ thermometry of a cold Fermi gas via dephasing impurities

The precise measurement of low temperatures is a challenging, important and fundamental task for quantum science. In particular, in-situ thermometry is highly desirable for cold atomic systems due to their potential for quantum simulation. Here we demonstrate that the temperature of a non-interacting Fermi gas can be accurately inferred from the non-equilibrium dynamics of impurities immersed within it, using an interferometric protocol and established experimental methods. Adopting tools from the theory of quantum parameter estimation, we show that our proposed scheme achieves optimal precision in the relevant temperature regime for degenerate Fermi gases in current experiments. We also discover an intriguing trade-off between measurement time and thermometric precision that is controlled by the impurity-gas coupling, with weak coupling leading to the greatest sensitivities. This is explained as a consequence of the slow decoherence associated with the onset of the Anderson orthogonality catastrophe, which dominates the gas dynamics following its local interaction with the immersed impurity.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2020

Symmetry breaking in binary Bose-Einstein condensates in the presence of an inhomogeneous artificial gauge field

We study a two component Bose-Einstein condensate in the presence of an inhomogeneous artificial gauge field. In response to this field, the condensate forms a localised vortex lattice structure that leads to a non-trivial symmetry breaking in the phase separated regime. The underlying physical mechanism can be understood by considering the energy landscape and we present a simplified model that is capable of reproducing the main features of the phase separation transition. The intuition gained by numerically solving this simplified model is then corroborated using the analytical Thomas-Fermi model.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗

arXiv2020

Coupling between guided modes of two parallel nanofibers

We study the coupling between the fundamental guided modes of two identical parallel nanofibers analytically and numerically. We calculate the coefficients of directional coupling, butt coupling, and mode energy changes as functions of the fiber radius, the light wavelength, and the fiber separation distance. We show that, due to the symmetry of the system, a mode of a nanofiber with the principal quasilinear polarization aligned along the radial or tangential axis is coupled only to the mode with the same corresponding principal polarization of the other nanofiber. We find that the effects of the butt coupling and the mode energy changes on the power transfer are significant when the fiber radius is small, the light wavelength is large, or the fiber separation distance is small. We show that the power transfer coefficient may achieve a local maximum or become zero when the fiber radius, the light wavelength, or the fiber separation distance varies indicating the system could be used in metrology for distance or wavelength measurements.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2020

Effects of coherence on quantum speed limits and shortcuts to adiabaticity in many-particle systems

We discuss the effects of many-body coherence on the speed of evolution of ultracold atomic gases and the relation to quantum speed limits. Our approach is focused on two related systems, spinless fermions and the bosonic Tonks-Girardeau gas, which possess equivalent density dynamics but very different coherence properties. To illustrate the effect of the coherence on the dynamics we consider squeezing an anharmonic potential which confines the particles and find that the speed of the evolution exhibits subtle, but fundamental differences between the two systems. Furthermore, we explore the difference in the driven dynamics by implementing a shortcut to adiabaticity designed to reduce spurious excitations. We show that collisions between the strongly interacting bosons can lead to changes in the coherence which results in different evolution speeds and therefore different fidelities of the final states.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2020

Orthogonality Catastrophe as a Consequence of the Quantum Speed Limit

A remarkable feature of quantum many-body systems is the orthogonality catastrophe which describes their extensively growing sensitivity to local perturbations and plays an important role in condensed matter physics. Here we show that the dynamics of the orthogonality catastrophe can be fully characterized by the quantum speed limit and, more specifically, that any quenched quantum many-body system whose variance in ground state energy scales with the system size exhibits the orthogonality catastrophe. Our rigorous findings are demonstrated by two paradigmatic classes of many-body systems -- the trapped Fermi gas and the long-range interacting Lipkin-Meshkov-Glick spin model.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2020

Chiral excitation of a single atom by a single photon in a guided mode of a nanofiber

We study the interaction between a single two-level atom and a single-photon probe pulse in a guided mode of a nanofiber. We examine the situation of chiral interaction, where the atom has a dipole rotating in the meridional plane of the nanofiber, and the probe pulse is quasilinearly polarized along the radial direction of the atom position in the fiber transverse plane. We show that the atomic excitation probability, the photon transmission flux, and the photon transmission probability depend on the propagation direction of the probe pulse along the fiber axis. In contrast, the reflection flux and the reflection probability do not depend on the propagation direction of the probe pulse. We find that the asymmetry parameter for the atomic excitation probability does not vary in time and does not depend on the probe pulse shape.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2020

Spin-orbit coupling in the presence of strong atomic correlations

We explore the influence of contact interactions on a synthetically spin-orbit coupled system of two ultracold trapped atoms. Even though the system we consider is bosonic, we show that a regime exists in which the competition between the contact and spin-orbit interactions results in the emergence of a ground state that contains a significant contribution from the anti-symmetric spin state. This ground state is unique to few-particle systems and does not exist in the mean-field regime. The transition to this state is signalled by an inversion in the average momentum from being dominated by centre-of-mass momentum to relative momentum and also affects the global entanglement shared between the real- and pseudo-spin spaces. Indeed, competition between the interactions can also result in avoided crossings in the groundstate which further enhances these correlations. However, we find that correlations shared between the pseudo-spin states are strongly depressed due to the spin-orbit coupling and therefore the system does not contain spin-spin entanglement.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗

arXiv2019

Controlled creation of three-dimensional vortex structures in Bose--Einstein condensates using artificial magnetic fields

The physics of quantized vortex excitations in atomic Bose-Einstein condensates has been extensively studied in recent years.Although simple vortex lines are relatively easy to create, control, and measure in experiments, it is a lot more difficult to do the same for vortex ring structures.Here we suggest and explore a method for generating and controlling superfluid vortex rings, vortex ring lattices, and other three dimensional vortex structures in toroidally-trapped superfluid Bose--Einstein condensates by using the artificial magnetic field produced by an optical nanofiber.The presence of the fiber also necessitates a multiply-connected geometry and we show that in this situation the presence of these vortex structures can be deduced from exciting the scissors mode of the condensate.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2019

Driving interactions efficiently in a composite few-body system

We study how to efficiently control an interacting few-body system consisting of three harmonically trapped bosons. Specifically we investigate the process of modulating the interparticle interactions to drive an initially non-interacting state to a strongly interacting one, which is an eigenstate of a chosen Hamiltonian. We also show that for unbalanced subsystems, where one can individually control the different inter- and intra-species interactions, complex dynamics originates when the symmetry of the ground state is broken by phase separation. However, as driving the dynamics too quickly can result in unwanted excitations of the final state, we optimize the driven processes using shortcuts to adiabaticity, which are designed to reduce these excitations at the end of the interaction ramp ensuring that the target eigenstate is reached.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗

arXiv2019

Torque of guided light on an atom near an optical nanofiber

We calculate analytically and numerically the axial orbital and spin torques of guided light on a two-level atom near an optical nanofiber. We show that the generation of these torques is governed by the angular momentum conservation law in the Minkowski formulation. The orbital torque on the atom near the fiber has a contribution from the average recoil of spontaneously emitted photons. Photon angular momentum and atomic spin angular momentum can be converted into atomic orbital angular momentum. The orbital and spin angular momenta of the guided field are not transferred separately to the orbital and spin angular momenta of the atom.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2019

Topological states in the Kronig-Penney model with arbitrary scattering potentials

We use an exact solution to the fundamental finite Kronig-Penney model with arbitrary positions and strengths of scattering sites to show that this iconic model can possess topologically non-trivial properties. By using free parameters of the system as extra dimensions we demonstrate the appearance of topologically protected edge states as well as the emergence of a Hofstadter butterfly-like quasimomentum spectrum, even in the case of small numbers of scattering sites. We investigate the behaviour of the system in the weak and strong scattering regimes and observe drastically different shapes of the quasimomentum spectrum.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2018

Chaotic few-body vortex dynamics in rotating Bose--Einstein condensates

We investigate a small vortex-lattice system of four co-rotating vortices in an atomic Bose--Einstein condensate and find that the vortex dynamics display chaotic behaviour after a system quench introduced by reversing the direction of circulation of a single vortex through a phase-imprinting process. By tracking the vortex trajectories and Lyapunov exponent, we show the onset of chaotic dynamics is not immediate, but occurs at later times and is accelerated by the close-approach and separation of all vortices in a scattering event. The techniques we develop could potentially be applied to create locally induced chaotic dynamics in larger lattice systems as a stepping stone to study the role of chaotic events in turbulent vortex dynamics.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗

arXiv2018

Fast control of interactions in an ultracold two atom system: Managing correlations and irreversibility

We design and explore a shortcut to adiabaticity (STA) for changing the interaction strength between two ultracold, harmonically trapped bosons. Starting from initially uncorrelated, non-interacting particles, we assume a time-dependent tuning of the inter-particle interaction through a Feshbach resonance, such that the two particles are strongly interacting at the end of the driving. The efficiency of the STA is then quantified by examining the thermodynamic properties of the system, such as the irreversible work, which is related to the out-of-equilibrium excitations in the system. We also quantify the entanglement of the two-particle state through the von Neumann entropy and show that the entanglement produced in the STA process matches that of the desired target state. Given the fundamental nature of the two-atom problem in ultracold atomic physics, the presented shortcut can be expected to have significant impact on many processes that rely on inter-particle interactions.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2018

Static and dynamic phases of a Tonks-Girardeau gas in an optical lattice

We investigate the properties of a Tonks-Girardeau gas in the presence of a one-dimensional lattice potential. Such a system is known to exhibit a pinning transition when the lattice is commensurate with the particle density, leading to the formation of an insulating state even at infinitesimally small lattice depths. Here we examine the properties of the gas at all lattices depths and, in addition to the static properties, also consider the non-adiabatic dynamics induced by the sudden motion of the lattice potential with a constant speed. Our work provides a continuum counterpart to the work done in discrete lattice models.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗