No Arabic abstract
Unitary drivings of quantum systems are ubiquitous in experiments and applications of quantum mechanics and the underlying energetic aspects, particularly relevant in quantum thermodynamics, are receiving growing attention. We investigate energetic advantages in unitary driving obtained from initial non-thermal states. We introduce the non-cyclic ergotropy to quantify the energetic gains, from which coherent (coherence-based) and incoherent (population-based) contributions are identified. In particular, initial quantum coherences appear to be always beneficial whereas non-passive population distributions not systematically. Additionally, these energetic gains are accessible only through non-adiabatic dynamics, contrasting with the usual optimality of adiabatic dynamics for initial thermal states. Finally, following frameworks established in the context of shortcut-to-adiabaticity, the energetic cost related to the implementation of the optimal drives are analysed and, in most situations, are found to be smaller than the energetic cost associated with shortcut-to-adiabaticity. We treat explicitly the example of a two-level system and show that energetic advantages increase with larger initial coherences, illustrating the interplay between initial coherences and the ability of the dynamics to consume and use coherences.
Entangled states like two-mode squeezed vacuum states are known to give quantum advantage in the illumination protocol, a method to detect a weakly reflecting target submerged in a thermal background. We use non-Gaussian photon-added and subtracted states as probes for the single-shot quantum illumination both in the presence and absence of noise. Based on the difference between the Chernoff bounds obtained with the coherent state and the non-Gaussian state having equal signal strengths, whose positive values are referred to as a quantum advantage in illumination, we classify the performance of non-Gaussian states, when photons are added (subtracted) in (from) a single mode or in (from) both the modes. We highlight the hierarchy among Gaussian and non-Gaussian states obtained via this method, which is compatible with correlations per unit signal strength. Interestingly, such hierarchy is different when comparisons are made only using the Chernoff bounds. The entire analysis is performed in presence of different noisy apparatus like faulty twin-beam generator, imperfect photon addition or subtraction as well as with noisy non-Gaussian probe states.
Quantum walks have by now been realized in a large variety of different physical settings. In some of these, particularly with trapped ions, the walk is implemented in phase space, where the corresponding position states are not orthogonal. We develop a general description of such a quantum walk and show how to map it into a standard one with orthogonal states, thereby making available all the tools developed for the latter. This enables a variety of experiments, which can be implemented with smaller step sizes and more steps. Tuning the non-orthogonality allows for an easy preparation of extended states such as momentum eigenstates, which travel at a well-defined speed with low dispersion. We introduce a method to adjust their velocity by momentum shifts, which allows to investigate intriguing effects such as the analog of Bloch oscillations.
We propose a classical to quantum information encoding system using non--orthogonal states and apply it to the problem of searching an element in a quantum list. We show that the proposed encoding scheme leads to an exponential gain in terms of quantum resources and, in some cases, to an exponential gain in the number of runs of the protocol. In the case where the output of the search algorithm is a quantum state with some particular physical property, the searched state is found with a single query to the introduced oracle. If the obtained quantum state must be converted back to classical information, our protocol demands a number of repetitions that scales polynomially with the number of qubits required to encode a classical string.
Characterization of equilibrium topological quantum phases by non-equilibrium quench dynamics provides a novel and efficient scheme in detecting topological invariants defined in equilibrium. Nevertheless, most of the previous studies have focused on the ideal sudden quench regime. Here we provide a generic non-adiabatic protocol of slowly quenching the system Hamiltonian, and investigate the non-adiabatic dynamical characterization scheme of topological phase. The {it slow} quench protocol is realized by introducing a Coulomb-like Landau-Zener problem, and it can describe, in a unified way, the crossover from sudden quench regime (deep non-adiabatic limit) to adiabatic regime. By analytically obtaining the final state vector after non-adiabatic evolution, we can calculate the time-averaged spin polarization and the corresponding topological spin texture. We find that the topological invariants of the post-quench Hamiltonian are characterized directly by the values of spin texture on the band inversion surfaces. Compared to the sudden quench regime, where one has to take an additional step to calculate the {it gradients} of spin polarization, this non-adiabatic characterization provides a {it minimal} scheme in detecting the topological invariants. Our findings are not restricted to 1D and 2D topological phases under Coulomb-like quench protocol, but are also valid for higher dimensional system or different quench protocol.
With adiabatic techniques, it is possible to create quantum superposition states with high fidelity while exercising limited control over the parameters of a system. However, because these techniques are slow compared to other timescales in the system, they are usually not suitable for creating highly unstable states or performing time-critical processes. Both of these situations arise in quantum information processing, where entangled states may only be isolated from the environment for a short time and where quantum computers require high-fidelity operations to be performed quickly. Recently it has been shown that techniques like optimal control and shortcuts to adiabaticity may be used to prepare quantum states non-adiabatically with high fidelity. Here we present two examples of how these techniques can be used to create maximally entangled many-body NOON states in one-dimensional Tonks--Girardeau gases.