No Arabic abstract
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 present a systematic scheme for optimization of quantum simulations. Specifically, we show how polychromatic driving can be used to significantly improve the driving of Raman transitions in the Lambda system, which opens new possibilities for controlled driven-induced effective dynamics.
We study the properties of a quantum particle interacting with a one dimensional structure of equidistant scattering centres. We derive an analytical expression for the dispersion relation and for the Bloch functions in the presence of both even and odd scattering waves within the pseudopotential approximation. This generalises the well-known solid-state physics text-book result known as the Kronig-Penney model. Our generalised model can be used to describe systems such as degenerate Fermi gases interacting with ions or with another neutral atomic species confined in an optical lattice, thus enabling the investigation of polaron or Kondo physics within a simple formalism. We focus our attention on the specific atom-ion system and compare our findings with quantum defect theory. Excellent agreement is obtained within the regime of validity of the pseudopotential approximation. This enables us to derive a Bose-Hubbard Hamiltonian for a degenerate quantum Bose gas in a linear chain of ions.
The importance of feedback control is being increasingly appreciated in quantum physics and applications. This paper describes the use of optimal control methods in the design of quantum feedback control systems, and in particular the paper formulates and solves a risk-sensitive optimal control problem. The resulting risk-sensitive optimal control is given in terms of a new unnormalized conditional state, whose dynamics include the cost function used to specify the performance objective. The risk-sensitive conditional dynamic equation describes the evolution of our {em knowledge} of the quantum system tempered by our {em purpose} for the controlled quantum system. Robustness properties of risk-sensitive controllers are discussed, and an example is provided.
We present a fast scheme for arbitrary unitary control of interacting bosonic atoms in a double-well. Assuming fixed inter-well tunnelling rate and intra-well interaction strength, we control the many-atom state by a discrete sequence of shifts of the single-well energies. For strong interactions, resonant tunnelling transitions implement beam-splitter U(2) rotations among atom number eigenstates, which can be combined and, thus, permit full controllability. By numerically optimizing such sequences of couplings at avoided level crossings (CALC), we extend the realm of full controllability to a wide range of realistic interaction parameters, while we remain in the simple control space. We demonstrate the efficiency and the high achievable fidelity of our proposal with non-adiabatic population transfer, N00N-state creation, a C-NOT gate, and a transistor-like, conditional evolution of several atoms.
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.