No Arabic abstract
We consider the dynamics of a single electron in a chain of tunnel coupled quantum dots, exploring the formal analogies of this system with some of the laser-driven multilevel atomic or molecular systems studied by Bruce W. Shore and collaborators over the last 30 years. In particular, we describe two regimes for achieving complete coherent transfer of population in such a multistate system. In the first regime, by carefully arranging the coupling strengths, the flow of population between the states of the system can be made periodic in time. In the second regime, by employing a counterintuitive sequence of couplings, the coherent population trapping eigenstate of the system can be rotated from the initial to the final desired state, which is an equivalent of the STIRAP technique for atoms or molecules. Our results may be useful in future quantum computation schemes.
Stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP) offers significant advantages for coherent population transfer between un- or weakly-coupled states and has the potential of realizing efficient quantum gate, qubit entanglement, and quantum information transfer. Here we report on the realization of STIRAP in a superconducting phase qutrit - a ladder-type system in which the ground state population is coherently transferred to the second-excited state via the dark state subspace. The result agrees well with the numerical simulation of the master equation, which further demonstrates that with the state-of-the-art superconducting qutrits the transfer efficiency readily exceeds $99%$ while keeping the population in the first-excited state below $1%$. We show that population transfer via STIRAP is significantly more robust against variations of the experimental parameters compared to that via the conventional resonant $pi$ pulse method. Our work opens up a new venue for exploring STIRAP for quantum information processing using the superconducting artificial atoms.
We develop a theoretical framework for the exploration of quantum mechanical coherent population transfer phenomena, with the ultimate goal of constructing faithful models of devices for classical and quantum information processing applications. We begin by outlining a general formalism for weak-field quantum optics in the Schr{o}dinger picture, and we include a general phenomenological representation of Lindblad decoherence mechanisms. We use this formalism to describe the interaction of a single stationary multilevel atom with one or more propagating classical or quantum laser fields, and we describe in detail several manifestations and applications of electromagnetically induced transparency. In addition to providing a clear description of the nonlinear optical characteristics of electromagnetically transparent systems that lead to ``ultraslow light, we verify that -- in principle -- a multi-particle atomic or molecular system could be used as either a low power optical switch or a quantum phase shifter. However, we demonstrate that the presence of significant dephasing effects destroys the induced transparency, and that increasing the number of particles weakly interacting with the probe field only reduces the nonlinearity further. Finally, a detailed calculation of the relative quantum phase induced by a system of atoms on a superposition of spatially distinct Fock states predicts that a significant quasi-Kerr nonlinearity and a low entropy cannot be simultaneously achieved in the presence of arbitrary spontaneous emission rates. Within our model, we identify the constraints that need to be met for this system to act as a one-qubit and a two-qubit conditional phase gate.
We study coherent excitation hopping in a spin chain realized using highly excited individually addressable Rydberg atoms. The dynamics are fully described in terms of an XY spin Hamiltonian with a long range resonant dipole-dipole coupling that scales as the inverse third power of the lattice spacing, $C_3/R^3$. The experimental data demonstrate the importance of next neighbor interactions which are manifest as revivals in the excitation dynamics. The results suggest that arrays of Rydberg atoms are ideally suited to large scale, high-fidelity quantum simulation of spin dynamics.
We present a fully electronic analogue of coherent population trapping in quantum optics, based on destructive interference of single-electron tunneling between three quantum dots. A large bias voltage plays the role of the laser illumination. The trapped state is a coherent superposition of the electronic charge in two of these quantum dots, so it is destabilized as a result of decoherence by coupling to external charges. The resulting current I through the device depends on the ratio of the decoherence rate Gamma_phi and the tunneling rates. For Gamma_phi --> 0 one has simply I=e Gamma_phi. With increasing Gamma_phi the current peaks at the inverse trapping time. The direct relation between I and Gamma_phi can serve as a means of measuring the coherence time of a charge qubit in a transport experiment.
Light-matter interaction, and the understanding of the fundamental physics behind, is the scenario of emerging quantum technologies. Solid state devices allow the exploration of new regimes where ultrastrong coupling (USC) strengths are comparable to subsystem energies, and new exotic phenomena like quantum phase transitions and ground-state entanglement occur. While experiments so far provided only spectroscopic evidence of USC, we propose a new dynamical protocol for detecting virtual photon pairs in the dressed eigenstates. This is the fingerprint of the violated conservation of the number of excitations, which heralds the symmetry broken by USC. We show that in flux-based superconducting architectures this photon production channel can be coherenly amplified by Stimulated Raman Adiabatic Passage (STIRAP). This provides a unique tool for an unambiguous dynamical detection of USC in present day hardware. Implementing this protocol would provide a benchmark for control of the dynamics of USC architectures, in view of applications to quantum information and microwave quantum photonics.