The time evolution of a two-level quantum mechanical system can be geometrically described using the Bloch sphere. By mapping the Bloch sphere evolution onto the dynamics of oscillating electric dipoles, we provide a physically intuitive link between classical electromagnetism and the electric dipole transitions of atomic & molecular physics.
Internal states of polar molecules can be controlled by microwave-frequency electric dipole transitions. If the applied microwave electric field has a spatial gradient, these transitions also affect the motion of these dipolar particles. This capability can be used to engineer phonon-mediated quantum gates between e.g. trapped polar molecular ion qubits without laser illumination and without the need for cooling near the motional ground state. The result is a high-speed quantum processing toolbox for dipoles in thermal motion that combines the precision microwave control of solid-state qubits with the long coherence times of trapped ion qubits.
An arbitrarily dense discretisation of the Bloch sphere of complex Hilbert states is constructed, where points correspond to bit strings of fixed finite length. Number-theoretic properties of trigonometric functions (not part of the quantum-theoretic canon) are used to show that this constructive discretised representation incorporates many of the defining characteristics of quantum systems: completementarity, uncertainty relationships and (with a simple Cartesian product of discretised spheres) entanglement. Unlike Meyers earlier discretisation of the Bloch Sphere, there are no orthonormal triples, hence the Kocken-Specker theorem is not nullified. A physical interpretation of points on the discretised Bloch sphere is given in terms of ensembles of trajectories on a dynamically invariant fractal set in state space, where states of physical reality correspond to points on the invariant set. This deterministic construction provides a new way to understand the violation of the Bell inequality without violating statistical independence or factorisation, where these conditions are defined solely from states on the invariant set. In this finite representation there is an upper limit to the number of qubits that can be entangled, a property with potential experimental consequences.
Bloch oscillations appear when an electric field is superimposed on a quantum particle that evolves on a lattice with a tight-binding Hamiltonian (TBH), i.e., evolves via what we will call an electric TBH; this phenomenon will be referred to as TBH Bloch oscillations. A similar phenomenon is known to show up in so-called electric discrete-time quantum walks (DQWs); this phenomenon will be referred to as DQW Bloch oscillations. This similarity is particularly salient when the electric field of the DQW is weak. For a wide, i.e., spatially extended initial condition, one numerically observes semi-classical oscillations, i.e., oscillations of a localized particle, both for the electric TBH and the electric DQW. More precisely: The numerical simulations strongly suggest that the semi-classical DQW Bloch oscillations correspond to two counter-propagating semi-classical TBH Bloch oscillations. In this work it is shown that, under certain assumptions, the solution of the electric DQW for a weak electric field and a wide initial condition is well approximated by the superposition of two continuous-time expressions, which are counter-propagating solutions of an electric TBH whose hopping amplitude is the cosine of the arbitrary coin-operator mixing angle. In contrast, if one wishes the continuous-time approximation to hold for spatially localized initial conditions, one needs at least the DQW to be lazy, as suggested by numerical simulations and by the fact that this has been proven in the case of a vanishing electric field.
In the Bloch sphere based representation of qudits with dimensions greater than two, the Heisenberg-Weyl operator basis is not preferred because of presence of complex Bloch vector components. We try to address this issue and parametrize a qutrit using the Heisenberg-Weyl operators by identifying eight real parameters and separate them as four weight and four angular parameters each. The four weight parameters correspond to the weights in front of the four mutually unbiased bases sets formed by the eigenbases of Heisenberg-Weyl observables and they form a four-dimensional unit radius Bloch hypersphere. Inside the four-dimensional hypersphere all points do not correspond to a physical qutrit state but still it has several other features which indicate that it is a natural extension of the qubit Bloch sphere. We study the purity, rank of three level systems, orthogonality and mutual unbiasedness conditions and the distance between two qutrit states inside the hypersphere. We also analyze the two and three-dimensional sections centered at the origin which gives a close structure for physical qutrit states inside the hypersphere. Significantly, we have applied our representation to find mutually unbiased bases(MUBs) and to characterize the unital maps in three dimensions. It should also be possible to extend this idea in higher dimensions.
In this work, we study the Wigner phase-space representation of qubit states encoded in continuous variables (CV) by using the Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill (GKP) mapping. We explore a possible connection between resources for universal quantum computation in discrete-variable (DV) systems, i.e. non-stabilizer states, and negativity of the Wigner function in CV architectures, which is a necessary requirement for quantum advantage. In particular, we show that the lowest Wigner logarithmic negativity of qubit states encoded in CV with the GKP mapping corresponds to encoded stabilizer states, while the maximum negativity is associated with the most non-stabilizer states, H-type and T-type quantum states.