No Arabic abstract
A relation is found between pulsed measurements of the excited state probability of a two-level atom illuminated by a driving laser, and a continuous measurement by a second laser coupling the excited state to a third state which decays rapidly and irreversibly. We find the time between pulses to achieve the same average detection time than a given continuous measurement in strong, weak, or intermediate coupling regimes, generalizing the results in L. S. Schulman, Phys. Rev. A 57, 1509 (1998).
Repeated measurements of a quantum particle to check its presence in a region of space was proposed long ago [G. R. Allcock, Ann. Phys. {bf 53}, 286 (1969)] as a natural way to determine the distribution of times of arrival at the orthogonal subspace, but the method was discarded because of the quantum Zeno effect: in the limit of very frequent measurements the wave function is reflected and remains in the original subspace. We show that by normalizing the small bits of arriving (removed) norm, an ideal time distribution emerges in correspondence with a classical local-kinetic-energy distribution.
Although interference is a classical-wave phenomenon, the superposition principle, which underlies interference of individual particles, is at the heart of quantum physics. An interaction-free measurements (IFM) harnesses the wave-particle duality of single photons to sense the presence of an object via the modification of the interference pattern, which can be accomplished even if the photon and the object havent interacted with each other. By using the quantum Zeno effect, the efficiency of an IFM can be made arbitrarily close to unity. Here we report an on-chip realization of the IFM based on silicon photonics. We exploit the inherent advantages of the lithographically written waveguides: excellent interferometric phase stability and mode matching, and obtain multipath interference with visibility above 98%. We achieved a normalized IFM efficiency up to 68.2%, which exceeds the 50% limit of the original IFM proposal.
We investigate theoretically the suppression of two-body losses when the on-site loss rate is larger than all other energy scales in a lattice. This work quantitatively explains the recently observed suppression of chemical reactions between two rotational states of fermionic KRb molecules confined in one-dimensional tubes with a weak lattice along the tubes [Yan et al., Nature 501, 521-525 (2013)]. New loss rate measurements performed for different lattice parameters but under controlled initial conditions allow us to show that the loss suppression is a consequence of the combined effects of lattice confinement and the continuous quantum Zeno effect. A key finding, relevant for generic strongly reactive systems, is that while a single-band theory can qualitatively describe the data, a quantitative analysis must include multiband effects. Accounting for these effects reduces the inferred molecule filling fraction by a factor of five. A rate equation can describe much of the data, but to properly reproduce the loss dynamics with a fixed filling fraction for all lattice parameters we develop a mean-field model and benchmark it with numerically exact time-dependent density matrix renormalization group calculations.
The effect of the anti-rotating terms on the short-time evolution and the quantum Zeno (QZE) and anti-Zeno (AQZE) effects is studied for a two-level system coupled to a bosonic environment. A unitary transformation and perturbation theory are used to obtain the electron self-energy, energy shift and the enhanced QZE or the AQZE, simultaneously. The calculated Zeno time depends on the atomic transition frequency sensitively. When the atomic transition frequency is smaller than the central frequency of the spectrum of boson environment, the Zeno time is prolonged and the anti-rotating terms enhance the QZE; when it is larger than that the Zeno time is reduced and the anti-rotating terms enhance the AQZE.
Thermodynamic equilibrium properties of a macroscopic system emerge from an interaction with a thermal bath. In the weak coupling regime, the description of thermodynamic states turns possible to describe the system in terms of its time-independent intensive and extensive variables. However, this is not an obvious task in both the classical and quantum cases when either dealing with finite systems described by a few degrees of freedom when the statistical fluctuations play an important role, i.e., not in the thermodynamic limit, or the coupling between the system and the environment is of the same order of magnitude as their energies. On the other hand, in recent years, metrology has been extended to the quantum regime in such a way that the fluctuation of physical quantities plays a crucial role in the precise estimation of parameters. Using metrology tools, it is possible to derive an uncertainty relation between the internal energy and temperature of systems for arbitrary linear coupling scales, showing an important connection between the two research fields. Our work is dedicated to the generalization of the thermodynamic uncertainty relations between an intensive and an extensive quantity for all coupling regimes in the quantum scenario through the generalized Gibbs ensemble (GGE). First, we demonstrate a fundamental limit between the intensive and extensive quantity for a total GGE state, which makes it possible to take the trace of the degrees of freedom of one of the systems and evaluate the uncertainty relation in the system of interest. After that, we performed a series of examples to corroborate the results already existing in the literature, thus showing the versatility of our method.