我建议将光子隧穿视为势垒两侧光子发射和吸收之间的时空相关现象。然后，可以应用基于适当计数率公式的标准技术来导出隧穿时间分布，而无需该量的任何{ \em ad hoc}定义。本文用Wigner-Weisskopf方法导出了势模型的一般公式。对于均匀正方形势垒，在隧穿几率为零的极限下，得到了隧穿时间为零的结论。
英文摘要：
I propose to consider photon tunneling as a space-time correlation phenomenon between the emission and absorption of a photon on the two sides of a barrier. Standard technics based on an appropriate counting rate formula may then be applied to derive the tunneling time distribution without any {\em ad hoc} definition of this quantity. General formulae are worked out for a potential model using Wigner-Weisskopf method. For a homogeneous square barrier in the limit of zero tunneling probability a vanishing tunneling time is obtained.
In contrast to recent studies [Rabl, Phys. Rev. Lett. 107, 063601 (2011); Nunnenkamp et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 107, 063602 (2011)] on photon blockade that prevents subsequent photons from resonantly entering the cavity in optomechanical systems, we study the photon-induced tunneling that increases the probability of admitting subsequent photons in those systems. In particular, we analytically and numerically show how twoor three-photon tunneling can occur by avoiding single-photon blockade. Our study provides another way on photon control using a single mechanical resonator in optomechanical sy…
Inspired by the recent experiment of Hamsen et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 118, 133604 (2017)], which demonstrated two-photon blockade in a driven nonlinear system (composed of a harmonic cavity with a driven atom), we show that two-photon blockade and other nonstandard types of photon blockade and photon-induced tunneling can be generated in a driven harmonic cavity without an atom or any other kind of nonlinearity, but instead coupled to a nonlinear (i.e., squeezed) reservoir. We also simulate these single- and two-photon effects with squeezed coherent states and displaced squeezed thermal states.
An optical realization of the phenomenon of many-body coherent destruction of tunneling, recently predicted for interacting many-boson systems by Gong, Molina and Haenggi [Phys. Rev. Lett. 103, 133002 (2009)], is proposed for light transport in engineered waveguide arrays. The optical system enables a direct visualization in Fock space of the many-body tunneling control process
In the light of the interest in the transport of single photons in arrays of waveguides, fiber couplers, photonic crystals, etc., we consider the quantum mechanical process of the tunneling of photons through evanescently or otherwise coupled structures. We specifically examine the issue of tunneling between two structures when one structure already contains few photons. We demonstrate the possibility of both photon aided and inhibited tunneling of photons. The Bosonic nature of photons enhances the tunneling probability. We also show how the multiphoton tunneling probability can be either enh…
We investigate the photon induced tunneling phenomena in a photonic crystal cavity containing a strongly coupled quantum dot and describe how this tunneling can be used to generate photon states consisting mainly of a particular Fock state. Additionally, we study experimentally the photon-induced tunneling as a function of excitation laser power and frequency and show the signature of second rung of the Jaynes-Cummings Hamiltonian in the observed photon-statistics.
Tunneling photons pose no challenge to Bohmian mechanics
Hefei National Research Center for Physical Sciences at the Microscale and School of Physical Sciences, University of Science and Technology of China（合肥微尺度物质科学国家研究中心和物理科学学院，中国科学技术大学）；Shanghai Research Center for Quantum Science and CAS Center for Excellence in Quantum Information and Quantum Physics, University of Science and Technology of China（上海量子科学研究中心和中国科学院量子信息重点实验室，中国科学技术大学）；Hefei National Laboratory, University of Science and Technology of China（合肥国家实验室，中国科学技术大学）
We perform photon-assisted-tunneling (PAT) experiments on a GaAs double quantum dot device under high microwave excitation power. Photon-assisted absorption of up to 14 photons is observed, when electron temperature (>1K) are far above the lattice temperature. Signatures of Landau-Zener-Stückelberg (LZS) interference are found even in this non-equilibrium PAT spectrum. In addition, the charge state relaxation time T_1~8ns measured in this out of thermal equilibrium double quantum dot is in agreement with other previous reports.
We focus on a recently experimentally realized scenario of normal-metal-insulator-superconductor tunnel junctions coupled to a superconducting resonator. We develop a first-principles theory to describe the effect of photon-assisted electron tunneling on the quantum state of the resonator. Our results are in very good quantitative agreement with the previous experiments on refrigeration and heating of the resonator using the photon-assisted tunneling, thus providing a stringent verification of the developed theory. Importantly, our results provide simple analytical estimates of the voltage-tun…
We study the impact of coherently generated lattice photons on an atomic Mott insulator subjected to a uniform force. Analogous to an array of tunnel-coupled and biased quantum dots, we observe sharp, interaction-shifted photon-assisted tunneling resonances corresponding to tunneling one and two lattice sites either with or against the force, and resolve multiorbital shifts of these resonances. By driving a Landau-Zener sweep across such a resonance, we realize a quantum phase transition between a paramagnet and an antiferromagnet, and observe quench dynamics when the system is tuned to the cr…
Previously, we built up a set of photon-free quantum random number generator(QRNG) with InGaAs single photon avalanche diodes. We exploited the stochastic property of quantum tunneling effect. Here, we utilized tunneling signals in Si diodes to implement quantum random number generator. In our experiment, instead of applying periodic pulses between the diode as we did in the InGaAs QRNG, we applied fixed voltage and detect time intervals between adjacent tunneling signals, as random source. This Si QRNG has a high performance in the randomness of its raw data and almost post-processing-free. F…
Photon emission by tunneling electrons can be encouraged by locating a resonator close to the tunnel junction and applying an appropriate voltage-bias. However, studies of normal metals show that the resonator also affects how the charges flow, facilitating processes in which correlated tunneling of two charges produces one photon. We develop a theory to analyze this kind of behavior in Josephson junctions by deriving an effective Hamiltonian describing processes where two Cooper-pairs generate a single photon. We determine the conditions under which the transport is dominated by incoherent tu…
Resonant tunneling of surface polaritons across a subwavelength vacuum gap between two polar or metallic bodies at different temperatures leads to an almost monochromatic heat transfer which can exceed by several orders of magnitude the far-field upper limit predicted by Planck's blackbody theory. However, despite its strong magnitude, this transfer is very far from the maximum theoretical limit predicted in near-field. Here we propose an amplifier for the photon heat tunneling based on a passive relay system intercalated between the two bodies, which is able to partially compensate the intrin…
We propose and analyze a simple mesoscopic quantum heat engine that exhibits both high-power and high-efficiency. The system consists of a biased Josephson junction coupled to two microwave cavities, with each cavity coupled to a thermal bath. Resonant Cooper pair tunneling occurs with the exchange of photons between cavities, and a temperature difference between the baths can naturally lead to a current against the voltage, and hence work. As a consequence of the unique properties of Cooper-pair tunneling, the heat current is completely separated from the charge current. This combined with th…
This paper proposes a simple setup for introducing an artificial magnetic field for neutral atoms in 2D optical lattices. This setup is based on the phenomenon of photon-assisted tunneling and involves a low-frequency periodic driving of the optical lattice. This low-frequency driving does not affect the electronic structure of the atom and can be easily realized by the same means which employed to create the lattice. We also address the problem of detecting this effective magnetic field. In particular, we study the center of mass wave-packet dynamics, which is shown to exhibit certain feature…
The interaction between propagating microwave fields and Cooper-pair tunneling across a DC voltage-biased Josephson junction can be highly nonlinear. We show theoretically that this nonlinearity can be used to convert an incoming single microwave photon into an outgoing $n$-photon Fock state in a different mode. In this process, the electrostatic energy released in a Cooper-pair tunneling event is transferred to the outgoing Fock state, providing energy gain. The created multi-photon Fock state is frequency entangled and highly bunched. The conversion can be made reflectionless (impedance-matc…
Artificial molecules containing just one or two electrons provide a powerful platform for studies of orbital and spin quantum dynamics in nanoscale devices. A well-known example of these dynamics is tunneling of electrons between two coupled quantum dots triggered by microwave irradiation. So far, these tunneling processes have been treated as electric dipole-allowed spin-conserving events. Here we report that microwaves can also excite tunneling transitions between states with different spin. In this work, the dominant mechanism responsible for violation of spin conservation is the spin-orbit…
We introduce a scheme that combines photon-assisted tunneling by a moving optical lattice with strong Hubbard interactions, and allows for the quantum simulation of paradigmatic quantum many-body models. We show that, in a certain regime, this quantum simulator yields an effective Hubbard Hamiltonian with tunable bond-charge interactions, a model studied in the context of strongly-correlated electrons. In a different regime, we show how to exploit a correlated destruction of tunneling to explore Nagaoka ferromagnetism at finite Hubbard repulsion. By changing the photon-assisted tunneling param…
We theoretically report an analog of photon-assisted tunneling (PAT) in a periodically driven lattice array without a static biased potential by studying a three-channel waveguide system. This analog of PAT can be achieved by only periodically modulating the top waveguide and adjusting the distance between the bottom and its adjacent waveguide. It is numerically shown that the PAT resonances also exist in the five-channel waveguide system and probably exist in the waveguide arrays with other odd numbers of waveguides, but they will become weak as the number of waveguides increases. With origin…
Forbidden transitions between energy levels typically involve violation of selection rules imposed by symmetry and/or conservation laws. A nanomagnet tunneling between up and down states violates angular momentum conservation because of broken rotational symmetry. Here we report observations of highly forbidden transitions between spin states in a Ni$_4$ single-molecule magnet in which a single photon can induce the spin to change by several times $\hbar$, nearly reversing the direction of the spin. These observations are understood as tunneling-assisted transitions that lift the standard $Δm …
Among the most exciting recent advances in the field of superconducting quantum circuits is the ability to coherently couple microwave photons in low-loss cavities to quantum electronic conductors (e.g.~semiconductor quantum dots or carbon nanotubes). These hybrid quantum systems hold great promise for quantum information processing applications; even more strikingly, they enable exploration of completely new physical regimes. Here we study theoretically the new physics emerging when a quantum electronic conductor is exposed to non-classical microwaves (e.g.~squeezed states, Fock states). We s…
We suggest a simple experimental method for probing antiferromagnetic spin correlations of two-component Fermi gases in optical lattices. The method relies on a spin selective Raman transition to excite atoms of one spin species to their first excited vibrational mode where the tunneling is large. The resulting difference in the tunneling dynamics of the two spin species can then be exploited, to reveal the spin correlations by measuring the number of doubly occupied lattice sites at a later time. We perform quantum Monte Carlo simulations of the spin system and solve the optical lattice dynam…
The ability to generate single photons is not only an ubiquitous tool for scientific exploration with applications ranging from spectroscopy and metrology to quantum computing, but also an important proof of the underlying quantum nature of a physical process. In the microwave regime, emission of anti-bunched radiation has so far relied on coherent control of Josephson qubits, where precisely calibrated microwave pulses are needed, and the achievable bandwidth is limited by the anharmonicity of the qubit. Here, we demonstrate the operation of a bright on-demand source of quantum microwave radi…
We describe a versatile toolbox for the quantum simulation of many-body lattice models, capable of exploring the combined effects of background Abelian and non-Abelian gauge fields, bond and site disorder, and strong on-site interactions. We show how to control the quantum dynamics of particles trapped in lattice potentials by the photon-assisted tunneling induced by periodic drivings. This scheme is general enough to be applied to either bosons or fermions with the additional advantage of being non-perturbative. It finds an ideal application in microfabricated ion trap arrays, where the quant…
We conjecture that the relative rate of time evolution depends on the amount of quantum correlations in a system. This is motivated by the experimental work [1] which showed that quantum tunneling is not instantaneous. The non-zero tunneling time may have other profound implications for the regulation of time in an entangled system. It opens the possibility that other types of quantum correlations may require non-zero rates of update. If this is true, it provides a mechanism for regulating the relative rate of time evolution.
We investigate the effects of disorder on single particle time-evolution and two-particle correlations in an array of evanescently coupled waveguides with position-dependent tunneling rates. In the clean limit, the energy spectrum of such an array is widely tunable. In the presence of a Hermitian on-site or tunneling disorder, we find that the localization of a wave packet is highly sensitive to this energy spectrum. In particular, for an input confined to a single waveguide, we show that the fraction of light localized to the original waveguide depends on the tunneling profile. We compare the…
Large quantum dot energy level shifts in anomalous photon-assisted tunneling
University of Wisconsin-Madison（威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校）；Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学）；Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research（荷兰应用科学研究组织）
We present here our recent results on qubit reset scheme based on a quantum-circuit refrigerator (QCR). In particular, we use the photon-assisted quasiparticle tunneling through a superconductor--insulator--normal-metal--insulator--superconductor junction to controllably decrease the energy relaxation time of the qubit during the QCR operation. In our experiment, we use a transmon qubit with dispersive readout. The QCR is capacitively coupled to the qubit through its normal-metal island. We employ rapid, square-shaped QCR control voltage pulses with durations in the range of 2--350 ns and a va…
Considering two-level media in the array of weakly coupled nano-cavities, we reveal a variety of dynamical regimes, such as diffusion, self-trapping, soliton, and breathers for the wave-packets in the presence of photon tunneling processes between the next-nearest cavities. We focus our attention on the low branch (LB) bright polariton soliton formation, due to the two-body polariton-polariton scattering processes. When detuning frequency is manipulated adiabatically, the low-branch lattice polariton localized states, i.e., that are solitons and breathers evolving between photon-like and matte…
A hallmark of quantum control is the ability to manipulate quantum emission at the nanoscale. Through scanning tunneling microscopy induced luminescence (STML) we are able to generate plasmonic light originating from inelastic tunneling processes that occur in a few-nanometer thick molecular film of C$_{60}$ deposited on Ag(111). Single photon emission, not of excitonic origin, occurs with a 1/$e$ lifetime of a tenth of a nanosecond or less, as shown through Hanbury Brown and Twiss photon intensity interferometry. We have performed tight-binding calculations of the electronic structure for the…
We show that a properly dc-biased Josephson junction in series with two microwave resonators of different frequencies emits photon pairs in the resonators. By measuring auto- and inter-correlations of the power leaking out of the resonators, we demonstrate two-mode amplitude squeezing below the classical limit. This non-classical microwave light emission is found to be in quantitative agreement with our theoretical predictions, up to an emission rate of 2 billion photon pairs per second.
Understanding the interaction between cavity photons and electronic nanocircuits is crucial for the development of Mesoscopic Quantum Electrodynamics (QED). One has to combine ingredients from atomic Cavity QED, like orbital degrees of freedom, with tunneling physics and strong cavity field inhomogeneities, specific to superconducting circuit QED. It is therefore necessary to introduce a formalism which bridges between these two domains. We develop a general method based on a photonic pseudo-potential to describe the electric coupling between electrons in a nanocircuit and cavity photons. In t…
