No Arabic abstract
It is usually considered that the spectrum of an optical cavity coupled to an atomic medium does not exhibit a normal-mode splitting unless the system satisfies the strong coupling condition, meaning the Rabi frequency of the coherent coupling exceeds the decay rates of atom and cavity excitations. Here we show that this need not be the case, but depends on the way in which the coupled system is probed. Measurements of the reflection of a probe laser from the input mirror of an overdamped cavity reveal an avoided crossing in the spectrum which is not observed when driving the atoms directly and measuring the Purcell-enhanced cavity emission. We understand these observations by noting a formal correspondence with electromagnetically-induced transparency of a three-level atom in free space, where our cavity acts as the absorbing medium and the coupled atoms play the role of the control field.
Quantum channels in free-space, an essential prerequisite for fundamental tests of quantum mechanics and quantum technologies in open space, have so far been based on direct line-of-sight because the predominant approaches for photon-encoding, including polarization and spatial modes, are not compatible with randomly scattered photons. Here we demonstrate a novel approach to transfer and recover quantum coherence from scattered, non-line-of-sight photons analyzed in a multimode and imaging interferometer for time-bins, combined with photon detection based on a 8x8 single-photon-detector-array. The observed time-bin visibility for scattered photons remained at a high $95%$ over a wide scattering angle range of -45 degree to +45 degree, while the individual pixels in the detector array resolve or track an image in its field of view of ca. 0.5 degrees. Using our method we demonstrate the viability of two novel applications. Firstly, using scattered photons as an indirect channel for quantum communication thereby enabling non-line-of-sight quantum communication with background suppression, and secondly, using the combined arrival time and quantum coherence to enhance the contrast of low-light imaging and laser ranging under high background light. We believe our method will instigate new lines for research and development on applying photon coherence from scattered signals to quantum sensing, imaging, and communication in free-space environments.
The recent advances in the study of thermodynamics of microscopic processes have driven the search for new developments in energy converters utilizing quantum effects. We here propose a universal framework to describe the thermodynamics of a quantum engine fueled by quantum projective measurements. Standard quantum thermal machines operating in a finite-time regime with a driven Hamiltonian that does not commute in different times have the performance decreased by the presence of coherence, which is associated with a larger entropy production and irreversibility degree. However, we show that replacing the standard hot thermal reservoir by a projective measurement operation with general basis in the Bloch sphere and controlling the basis angles suitably could improve the performance of the quantum engine as well as decrease the entropy change during the measurement process. Our results go in direction of a generalization of quantum thermal machine models where the fuel comes from general sources beyond the standard thermal reservoir.
We observe the quantum coherent dynamics of atomic spinor wavepackets in the double well potentials of a far-off-resonance optical lattice. With appropriate initial conditions the system Rabi oscillates between the left and right localized states of the ground doublet, and at certain times the wavepacket corresponds to a coherent superposition of these mesoscopically distinguishable quantum states. The atom/optical double well potential is a flexible and powerful system for further study of mesoscopic quantum coherence, quantum control and the quantum/classical transition.
In this letter we study the propagation of light in the neighbourhood of magnetised neutron stars. Thanks to the optical properties of quantum vacuum in the presence of a magnetic field, light emitted by background astronomical objects is deviated giving rise to a phenomenon of the same kind as the gravitational one. We give a quantitative estimation of this effect and we discuss the possibility of its observation. We show that this effect could be detected monitoring the evolution of the recently discovered double neutron star system J0737-3039.
This study is focused on the quantum dynamics of a nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center coupled to a nonlinear, periodically driven mechanical oscillator. For a continuous periodic driving that depends on the position of the oscillator, the mechanical motion is described by Mathieu elliptic functions. This solution is employed to study the dynamics of the quantum spin system including environmental effects and to evaluate the purity and the von Neumann entropy of the NV-spin. The unitary generation of coherence is addressed. We observe that the production of coherence through a unitary transformation depends on whether the system is prepared initially in mixed state. Production of coherence is efficient when the system initially is prepared in the region of the separatrix (i.e., the region where classical systems exhibit dynamical chaos). From the theory of dynamical chaos, we know that phase trajectories of the system passing through the homoclinic tangle have limited memory, and therefore the information about the initial conditions is lost. We proved that quantum chaos and diminishing of information about the mixed initial state favors the generation of quantum coherence through the unitary evolution. We introduced quantum distance from the homoclinic tangle and proved that for the initial states permitting efficient generation of coherence, this distance is minimal.