No Arabic abstract
Ultracold atoms are trapped circumferentially on a ring that is pierced at its center by a flux tube arising from a light-induced gauge potential due to applied Laguerre-Gaussian fields. We show that by using optical coherent state superpositions to produce light-induced gauge potentials, we can create a situation in which the trapped atoms are simultaneously exposed to two distinct flux tubes, thereby creating superpositions in atomic quantum rings. We consider the examples of both a ring geometry and harmonic trapping, and in both cases the ground state of the quantum system is shown to be a superposition of counter-rotating states of the atom trapped on the two distinct flux tubes.
The efficiency of extracting single atoms or molecules from an ultracold bosonic reservoir is theoretically investigated for a protocol based on lasers, coupling the hyperfine state in which the atoms form a condensate to another stable state, in which the atom experiences a tight potential in the regime of collisional blockade, the quantum tweezers. The transfer efficiency into the single-atom ground state of the tight trap is fundamentally limited by the collective modes of the condensate, which are thermally and dynamically excited. The noise due to these excitations can be quenched for sufficiently long laser pulses, thereby achieving high efficiencies. These results show that this protocol can be applied for initializing a quantum register based on tweezer traps for neutral atoms.
Quantum simulators allow to explore static and dynamical properties of otherwise intractable quantum many-body systems. In many instances, however, it is the read-out that limits such quantum simulations. In this work, we introduce a new paradigm of experimental read-out exploiting coherent non-interacting dynamics in order to extract otherwise inaccessible observables. Specifically, we present a novel tomographic recovery method allowing to indirectly measure second moments of relative density fluctuations in one-dimensional superfluids which until now eluded direct measurements. We achieve this by relating second moments of relative phase fluctuations which are measured at different evolution times through known dynamical equations arising from unitary non-interacting multi-mode dynamics. Applying methods from signal processing we reconstruct the full matrix of second moments, including the relative density fluctuations. We employ the method to investigate equilibrium states, the dynamics of phonon occupation numbers and even to predict recurrences. The method opens a new window for quantum simulations with one-dimensional superfluids, enabling a deeper analysis of their equilibration and thermalization dynamics.
We study how macroscopic superpositions of coherent states produced by the nondissipative dynamics of binary mixtures of ultracold atoms are affected by atom losses. We identify different decoherence scenarios for symmetric or asymmetric loss rates and interaction energies in the two modes. In the symmetric case the quantum coherence in the superposition is lost after a single loss event. By tuning appropriately the energies we show that the superposition can be protected, leading to quantum correlations useful for atom interferometry even after many loss events.
Quantum technologies will ultimately require manipulating many-body quantum systems with high precision. Cold atom experiments represent a stepping stone in that direction: a high degree of control has been achieved on systems of increasing complexity, however, this control is still sub-optimal. Optimal control theory is the ideal candidate to bridge the gap between early stage and optimal experimental protocols, particularly since it was extended to encompass many-body quantum dynamics. Here, we experimentally demonstrate optimal control applied to two dynamical processes subject to interactions: the coherent manipulation of motional states of an atomic Bose-Einstein condensate and the crossing of a quantum phase transition in small systems of cold atoms in optical lattices. We show theoretically that these transformations can be made fast and robust with respect to perturbations, including temperature and atom number fluctuations, resulting in a good agreement between theoretical predictions and experimental results.
We propose a quantum-enhanced iterative (with $K$ steps) measurement scheme based on an ensemble of $N$ two-level probes which asymptotically approaches the Heisenberg limit $delta_K propto R^{-K/(K+1)}$, $R$ the number of quantum resources. The protocol is inspired by Kitaevs phase estimation algorithm and involves only collective manipulation and measurement of the ensemble. The iterative procedure takes the shot-noise limited primary measurement with precision $delta_1propto N^{-1/2}$ to increasingly precise results $delta_Kpropto N^{-K/2}$. A straightforward implementation of the algorithm makes use of a two-component atomic cloud of Bosons in the precision measurement of a magnetic field.