No Arabic abstract
Bohmian mechanics was designed to give rise to predictions identical to those derived by standard quantum mechanics, while invoking a specific interpretation of it - one which allows the classical notion of a particle to be maintained alongside a guiding wave. For this, the Bohmian model makes use of a unique quantum potential which governs the trajectory of the particle. In this work we show that this interpretation of quantum theory naturally leads to the derivation of interesting new phenomena. Specifically, we demonstrate how the fundamental Casimir-Polder force, by which atoms are attracted to a surface, may be temporarily suppressed by utilizing a specially designed quantum potential. We show that when harnessing the quantum potential via a suitable atomic wavepacket engineering, the absorption by the surface can be dramatically reduced. This is proven both analytically and numerically. Finally, an experimental scheme is proposed for achieving the required shape for the atomic wavepacket. All these may enable new insights into Bohmian mechanics as well as new applications to metrology and sensing.
The quantum walk has emerged recently as a paradigmatic process for the dynamic simulation of complex quantum systems, entanglement production and quantum computation. Hitherto, photonic implementations of quantum walks have mainly been based on multi-path interferometric schemes in real space. Here, we report the experimental realization of a discrete quantum walk taking place in the orbital angular momentum space of light, both for a single photon and for two simultaneous photons. In contrast to previous implementations, the whole process develops in a single light beam, with no need of interferometers; it requires optical resources scaling linearly with the number of steps; and it allows flexible control of input and output superposition states. Exploiting the latter property, we explored the system band structure in momentum space and the associated spin-orbit topological features by simulating the quantum dynamics of Gaussian wavepackets. Our demonstration introduces a novel versatile photonic platform for quantum simulations.
We explore a possibility of measuring deviation from the exponential decay law in pure quantum systems. The power law behavior at late times of decay time profile is predicted in quantum mechanics, and has been experimentally attempted to detect, but with failures except a claim in an open system. It is found that electron tunneling from resonance state confined in man-made atoms, quantum dots, has a good chance of detecting the deviation and testing theoretical predictions. How initial unstable state is prepared influences greatly the time profile of decay law, and this can be used to set the onset time of the power law at earlier times. Comparison with similar process of nuclear alpha decay to discover the deviation is discussed, to explain why there exists a difficulty in this case.
We show that specific quantum noise, acting as an open-system reservoir for non-locally entangled atoms, can serve to preserve rather than degrade joint coherence. This creates a new type of long-time control over hiding and recovery of quantum entanglement.
We define the notion of mutual quantum measurements of two macroscopic objects and investigate the effect of these measurements on the velocities of the objects. We show that multiple mutual quantum measurements can lead to an effective force emerging as a consequence of asymmetric diffusion in the velocity space. We further show that, under a certain set of assumptions involving the measurements of mutual Doppler shifts, the above force can reproduce Newtons law of gravitation. Such a mechanism would explain the equivalence between the gravitational and the inertial masses. For a broader class of measurements, the emergent force can also lead to corrections to Newtons gravitation.
We test the ability of semiclassical theory to describe quantitatively the revival of quantum wavepackets --a long time phenomena-- in the one dimensional quartic oscillator (a Kerr type Hamiltonian). Two semiclassical theories are considered: time-dependent WKB and Van Vleck propagation. We show that both approaches describe with impressive accuracy the autocorrelation function and wavefunction up to times longer than the revival time. Moreover, in the Van Vleck approach, we can show analytically that the range of agreement extends to arbitrary long times.