Floquet control of quantum dissipation in spin chains

Controlling the decoherence induced by the interaction of quantum system with its environment is a fundamental challenge in quantum technology. Utilizing Floquet theory, we explore the constructive role of temporal periodic driving in suppressing decoherence of a spin-1/2 particle coupled to a spin bath. It is revealed that, accompanying the formation of a Floquet bound state in the quasienergy spectrum of the whole system including the system and its environment, the dissipation of the spin system can be inhibited and the system tends to coherently synchronize with the driving. It can be seen as an analog to the decoherence suppression induced by the structured environment in spatially periodic photonic crystal setting. Comparing with other decoherence control schemes, our protocol is robust against the fluctuation of control parameters and easy to realize in practice. It suggests a promising perspective of periodic driving in decoherence control.

Extended dual description of Mott transition beyond two-dimensional space

Motivated by recent work of Mross and Senthil [Phys. Rev. B textbf{84}, 165126 (2011)] which provides a dual description for Mott transition from Fermi liquid to quantum spin liquid in two space dimensions, we extend their approach to higher dimensional cases, and we provide explicit formalism in three space dimensions. Instead of the vortices driving conventional Fermi liquid into quantum spin liquid states in 2D, it is the vortex lines to lead to the instability of Fermi liquid in 3D. The extended formalism can result in rich consequences when the vortex lines condense in different degrees of freedom. For example, when the vortex lines condense in charge phase degrees of freedom, the resulting effective fermionic action is found to be equivalent to that obtained by well-studied slave-particle approaches for Hubbard and/or Anderson lattice models, which confirm the validity of the extended dual formalism in 3D. When the vortex lines condense in spin phase degrees of freedom, a doublon metal with a spin gap and an instability to the unconventional superconducting pairing can be obtained. In addition, when the vortex lines condense in both phase degrees, an exotic doubled U(1) gauge theory occurs which describes a separation of spin-opposite fermionic excitations. It is noted that the first two features have been discussed in a similar way in 2D, the last one has not been reported in the previous works. The present work is expected to be useful in understanding the Mott transition happening beyond two space dimensions.

Dissipative solitons stabilized by a quantum Zeno-like effect

An unstable particle in quantum mechanics can be stabilized by frequent measurements, known as the quantum Zeno effect. A soliton with dissipation behaves like an unstable particle. Similar to the quantum Zeno effect, here we show that the soliton can be stabilized by modulating periodically dispersion, nonlinearity, or the external harmonic potential available in BEC. This can be obtained by analyzing a Painleve integrability condition, which results from the rigorous Painleve analysis of the generalized nonautonomous nonlinear Schrodinger equation. The result has a profound implication to the optical soliton transmission and the matter-wave soliton dynamics.