The emission characteristics in the fluorescence of two laser-driven dipole-dipole-interacting three level atoms is investigated. When the light from both atoms is detected separately a correlation of the emission processes is observed in dependence of the dipole-dipole interaction. This opens the possibility to investigate the dipole-dipole interaction through the emission behavior. We present Monte-Carlo simulations which are in good agreement with the analytic solutions.
A simplified scheme for the investigation of cooperative effects in the quantum jump statistics of small numbers of fluorescing atoms and ions in a trap is presented. It allows the analytic treatment of three dipole-dipole interacting four-level systems which model the relevant level scheme of Ba+ ions. For the latter, a huge rate of double and triple jumps was reported in a former experiment and the huge rate was attributed to the dipole-dipole interaction. Our theoretical results show that the effect of the dipole-dipole interaction on these rates is at most 5% and that for the parameter val…
Cooperative effects in the fluorescence of two dipole-interacting atoms, with macroscopic quantum jumps (light and dark periods), are investigated. The transition rates between different intensity periods are calculated in closed form and are used to determine the rates of double jumps between periods of double intensity and dark periods, the mean duration of the three intensity periods and the mean rate of their occurrence. We predict, to our knowledge for the first time, cooperative effects for double jumps, for atomic distances from one and to ten wave lengths of the strong transition. The …
We investigate the effect of the dipole-dipole interaction on the quantum jump statistics of three atoms. This is done for three-level systems in a V configuration and in what may be called a D configuration. The transition rates between the four different intensity periods are calculated in closed form. Cooperative effects are shown to increase by a factor of 2 compared to two of either three-level systems. This results in transition rates that are, for distances of about one wavelength of the strong transition, up to 100% higher than for independent systems. In addition the double and triple…
We first use the quantum method to replicate the well-known results of a single atom relaxing, whilst demonstrating the intuitive picture it provides for dissipative dynamics. By use of individual "quantum trajectories", the method allows for simulation of systems inaccessible to ensemble treatments. This is shown by replicating resonance fluorescence, allowing us to concurrently demonstrate the method's facilitation of calculating photon statistics by the creation of discrete photon streams. To analyse these, we solidify the theoretical basis for, and implement, a computational method of calc…
A finite-dimensional Markovian open quantum system will undergo quantum jumps between pure states, if we can monitor the bath to which it is coupled with sufficient precision. In general these jumps, plus the between-jump evolution, create a trajectory which passes through infinitely many different pure states, even for ergodic systems. However, as shown recently by us [Phys. Rev. Lett. \textbf{106}, 020406 (2011)], it is possible to construct {\em adaptive} monitorings which restrict the system to jumping between a finite number of states. That is, it is possible to track the system using a {…
A quasi-free quantum particle endowed with Heaviside position dependent mass jump is observed to experience scattering effects manifested by its by-product introduction of the derivative of the Dirac's-delta point dipole interaction. Using proper parametric mappings, the reflection and transmission coefficients are obtained. A new ordering ambiguity parameters set, as the only feasibly admissible within the current methodical proposal, is suggested.
Dissipation generally leads to the decoherence of a quantum state. In contrast, numerous recent proposals have illustrated that dissipation can also be tailored to stabilize many-body entangled quantum states. While the focus of these works has been primarily on engineering the non-equilibrium steady state, we investigate the build-up of entanglement in the quantum trajectories. Specifically, we analyze the competition between two different dissipation channels arising from two incompatible continuous monitoring protocols. The first protocol locks the phase of neighboring sites upon registerin…
Quantum physics was invented to account for two fundamental features of measurement results -- their discreetness and randomness. Emblematic of these features is Bohr's idea of quantum jumps between two discrete energy levels of an atom. Experimentally, quantum jumps were first observed in an atomic ion driven by a weak deterministic force while under strong continuous energy measurement. The times at which the discontinuous jump transitions occur are reputed to be fundamentally unpredictable. Can there be, despite the indeterminism of quantum physics, a possibility to know if a quantum jump i…
It is problematic to interpret the quantum jumps of an atom interacting with thermal light in terms of counts at detectors monitoring the atom's inputs and outputs. As an alternative, we develop an interpretation based on a self-consistency argument. We include one mode of the thermal field in the system Hamiltonian and describe its interaction with the atom by an entangled quantum state while assuming that the other modes induce quantum jumps in the usual fashion. In the weak-coupling limit, the photon number expectation of the selected mode is also seen to execute quantum jumps, although mor…
The mutual dipole-dipole interaction of atoms in a trap can affect their fluorescence. Extremely large effects were reported for double jumps between different intensity periods in experiments with two and three Ba^+ ions for distances in the range of about ten wave lengths of the strong transition while no effects were observed for Hg^+ at 15 wave lengths. In this theoretical paper we study this question for configurations with three and four levels which model those of Hg^+ and Ba^+, respectively. For two systems in the Hg^+ configuration we find cooperative effects of up to 30% for distance…
We analyze the capability of discriminating the statistical nature of a thermal bath by exploiting the interaction with an additional environment. We first shows that, at difference with the standard scenario where the additional environment is not present, the modified evolution induced by the mere presence of the extra bath allows to improve the discrimination task. We then also consider the possibility of continuously monitoring the additional environment and we discuss in detail how to obtain improved performances in the discrimination by considering different kinds of interaction, i.e. di…
We report a model that makes it possible to analyze quantitatively the dipole blockade effect on the dynamical evolution of a two two-level atom system driven by an external laser field. The multiple excitations of the atomic sample are taken into account. We find very large concurrence in the dipole blockade regime. We further find that entanglement can be tuned by changing the intensity of the exciting laser. We also report a way to lift the dipole blockade paving the way to manipulate in a controllable way the blockade effects. We finally report how a continuous monitoring of the dipole blo…
A $D$-dimensional Markovian open quantum system will undergo quantum jumps between pure states, if we can monitor the bath to which it is coupled with sufficient precision. In general these jumps, plus the between-jump evolution, create a trajectory which passes through infinitely many different pure states. Here we show that, for any ergodic master equation, one can expect to find an {\em adaptive} monitoring scheme on the bath that can confine the system state to jumping between only $K$ states, for some $K \geq (D-1)^2+1$. For $D=2$ we explicitly construct a 2-state ensemble for any ergodic…
We use the quantum jump approach to study the entanglement dynamics of a quantum register, which is composed of two or three dipole-dipole coupled two-level atoms, interacting with a common environment. Our investigation of entanglement dynamics reflects that the environment has dual actions on the entanglement of the qubits in the model. While the environment destroys the entanglement induced by the coherent dipole-dipole interactions, it can produce stable entanglement between the qubits prepared initially in a separable state. The analysis shows that it is the entangled decoherence-free sta…
Quantum metrology enhances measurement precision by utilising the properties of quantum physics. In interferometry, this is typically achieved by evolving highly-entangled quantum states before performing single-shot measurements to reveal information about an unknown parameter. While this is often the optimum approach, implementation with all but the smallest states is still extremely challenging. An alternative approach is quantum jump metrology [L. A. Clark et al., Phys. Rev. A 99, 022102 (2019)] which deduces information by continuously monitoring an open quantum system, while inducing pha…
The dynamics of open quantum systems is generally described by a master equation, which describes the loss of information into the environment. By using a simple model of uncoupled emitters, we illustrate how the recovery of this information depends on the monitoring scheme applied to register the decay clicks. The dissipative dynamics, in this case, is described by pure-state stochastic trajectories and we examine different unravelings of the same master equation. More precisely, we demonstrate how registering the sequence of clicks from spontaneously emitted photons through a linear optical …
A microscopic system under continuous observation exhibits at random times sudden jumps between its states. The detection of this essential quantum feature requires a quantum non-demolition (QND) measurement repeated many times during the system evolution. Quantum jumps of trapped massive particles (electrons, ions or molecules) have been observed, which is not the case of the jumps of light quanta. Usual photodetectors absorb light and are thus unable to detect the same photon twice. They must be replaced by a transparent counter 'seeing' photons without destroying them3. Moreover, the light …
Most quantum-error correcting codes assume that the decoherence of each physical qubit is independent of the decoherence of any other physical qubit. We can test the validity of this assumption in an experimental setup where a microwave feedline couples to multiple qubits by examining correlations between the qubits. Here, we investigate the correlations between fluxonium qubits located in a single waveguide. Despite being in a wide-bandwidth electromagnetic environment, the qubits have measured relaxation times in excess of 100 us. We use cascaded Josephson parametric amplifiers to measure th…
The quantum-jump approach is used for a theoretical description of resonance luminescence from a {\em single} semiconductor quantum dot in contact with its solid-state environment. For continuous excitation of the single-exciton groundstate the luminescence exhibits bright periods, where photons are spontaneously emitted from the exciton decay, which are interrupted by dark periods when one electron or hole suffers a spin flip. It is shown that continuously monitored resonance luminescence provides a very sensitive measure of such rare single scattering events in quantum dots.
We consider inter-atomic forces due to resonant dipole-dipole interactions within a dimer of highly excited Rydberg atoms, embedded in an ultra-cold gas. These forces rely on a coherent superposition of two-atom electronic states, which is destroyed by continuous monitoring of the dimer state through a detection scheme utilizing controllable interactions with the background gas atoms. We show that this intrinsic decoherence of the molecular energy surface can gradually deteriorate a repulsive dimer state, causing a mixing of attractive and repulsive character. For sufficiently strong decoheren…
As the energy relaxation time of superconducting qubits steadily improves, non-equilibrium quasiparticle excitations above the superconducting gap emerge as an increasingly relevant limit for qubit coherence. We measure fluctuations in the number of quasiparticle excitations by continuously monitoring the spontaneous quantum jumps between the states of a fluxonium qubit, in conditions where relaxation is dominated by quasiparticle loss. Resolution on the scale of a single quasiparticle is obtained by performing quantum non-demolition projective measurements within a time interval much shorter …
A continuously monitored quantum system prepared in an excited state will decay to its ground state with an abrupt jump. The jump occurs stochastically on a characteristic time scale T1, the lifetime of the excited state. These quantum jumps, originally envisioned by Bohr, have been observed in trapped atoms and ions, single molecules, photons, and single electrons in cyclotrons. Here we report the first observation of quantum jumps in a macroscopic quantum system, in our case a superconducting "artificial atom" or quantum bit (qubit) coupled to a superconducting microwave cavity. We use a fas…
A quantum system subjected to a strong continuous monitoring undergoes quantum jumps. This very well known fact hides a neglected subtlety: sharp scale-invariant fluctuations invariably decorate the jump process even in the limit where the measurement rate is very large. This article is devoted to the quantitative study of these remaining fluctuations, which we call spikes, and to a discussion of their physical status. We start by introducing a classical model where the origin of these fluctuations is more intuitive and then jump to the quantum realm where their existence is less intuitive. We…
This paper is a proposal for the generation of many-body entangled state in atomic and mechanical systems. Application of strong Rydberg dressing interaction and fast bifurcation scheme in an ultra-stable Cs lattice clock in this proposal results to a breakthrough in the formation of large cat states. By detailed study of the de-coherence effects using Quantum Jump Monte Carlo approach and considering obstacles in dense ensembles namely level mixing, molecule formation and collective decoherence this proposal predicts the formation of 700 atoms cat state. Dipole coupling between Rydberg atoms …
We study the entanglement between two identical two-level atoms located near an ideal model of invisibility cloaks, by monitoring the the time evolution of the concurrence measure. We obtain the reduced density operator of the atomic subsystem based on a canonical quantization scheme presented for the electromagnetic field interacting with atomic systems in the presence of an anisotropic, inhomogeneous and absorbing magnetodielectric medium. It is shown that two atoms, which are prepared initially in an unentangled state, are correlated in weak coupling regime via the spontaneous emission and …
We propose two quantum error correction schemes which increase the maximum storage time for qubits in a system of cold trapped ions, using a minimal number of ancillary qubits. Both schemes consider only the errors introduced by the decoherence due to spontaneous emission from the upper levels of the ions. Continuous monitoring of the ion fluorescence is used in conjunction with selective coherent feedback to eliminate these errors immediately following spontaneous emission events, and the conditional time evolution between quantum jumps is removed by symmetrizing the quantum codewords.
A quantum system driven by a weak deterministic force while under strong continuous energy measurement exhibits quantum jumps between its energy levels (Nagourney et al., 1986, Sauter et al., 1986, Bergquist et al., 1986). This celebrated phenomenon is emblematic of the special nature of randomness in quantum physics. The times at which the jumps occur are reputed to be fundamentally unpredictable. However, certain classical phenomena, like tsunamis, while unpredictable in the long term, may possess a degree of predictability in the short term, and in some cases it may be possible to prevent a…
Assemblies of Rydberg atoms subject to resonant dipole-dipole interactions form Frenkel excitons. We show that van-der-Waals shifts can significantly modify the exciton wave function, whenever atoms approach each other closely. As a result, attractive excitons and repulsive van-der-Waals interactions can be combined to form stable one-dimensional atom chains, akin to bound aggregates. Here the van-der-Waals shifts ensure a stronger homogeneous delocalisation of a single excitation over the whole chain, enabling it to bind up to six atoms. When brought into unstable configurations, such Rydberg…
To investigate the effect of a classical environment on a quantum mechanical system we consider two two-level atoms in a free radiation field in the presence of a screen. By assuming that the screen causes continuous ideal measurements on the free radiation field we derive a quantum jump description for the state of the atoms. Our results are consistent with the master equations for dipole interacting atoms, but give more insight in the time evolution of a single system. To illustrate this we derive a necessary and sufficient criterion for interference in a two-atom double-slit experiment and …
Exact Hilbert-space ergodicity from continuous monitoring
Institute for Advanced Study, Tsinghua University（清华大学高等研究院）；Department of Physics & State Key Laboratory of Surface Physics, Fudan University（复旦大学物理系与表面物理国家重点实验室）
Quantum error correction (QEC) is required for a practical quantum computer because of the fragile nature of quantum information. In QEC, information is redundantly stored in a large Hilbert space and one or more observables must be monitored to reveal the occurrence of an error, without disturbing the information encoded in an unknown quantum state. Such observables, typically multi-qubit parities such as <XXXX>, must correspond to a special symmetry property inherent to the encoding scheme. Measurements of these observables, or error syndromes, must also be performed in a quantum non-demolit…
We propose to use the effect of measurements instead of their number to study the time evolution of quantum systems under monitoring. This time redefinition acts like a microscope which blows up the inner details of seemingly instantaneous transitions like quantum jumps. In the simple example of a continuously monitored qubit coupled to a heat bath, we show that this procedure provides well defined and simple evolution equations in an otherwise singular strong monitoring limit. We show that there exists anomalous observable localised on sharp transitions which can only be resolved with our new…
Using the Clifford algebra formalism we extend the quantum jumps algorithm of the Event Enhanced Quantum Theory (EEQT) to convex state figures other than those stemming from convex hulls of complex projective spaces that form the basis for the standard quantum theory. We study quantum jumps on n-dimensional spheres, jumps that are induced by symmetric configurations of non-commuting state monitoring detectors. The detectors cause quantum jumps via geometrically induced conformal maps (Mobius transformations) and realize iterated function systems (IFS) with fractal attractors located on n-dimen…
This work reports on the real-time detection of internal-state dynamics of cold Rb$^{87}$ atoms being excited to the $30D_{5/2}$ Rydberg state via two-photon excitation. A mesoscopic cloud of atoms is overlapped with the mode volume of a confocal optical cavity and optically pumped by two laser beams transverse to the cavity axis. The excitation to Rydberg states changes the collective atom-cavity coupling, which is detected by monitoring the light transmitted through the cavity while being weakly driven. In addition to the damped coherent excitation dynamics and the decay back to the ground s…
Conditional fluctuation theorems and entropy production for monitored quantum systems under imperfect detection
Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Physics and Complex Systems IFISC (UIB-CSIC)（交叉物理与复杂系统研究所）；Departamento de Física Aplicada, Universidad de Alicante（阿利坎特大学应用物理系）
We present a quantum electrical circuit with Josephson junctions formed of two anharmonic oscillators coupled with an interaction $gγ_{1}^{2}γ_{2}^{2}$ where $γ_{1}$ and $γ_{2}$ are position-like coordinates. This type of coupling allows the quantum non-demolition measurement of the energy of one oscillator by monitoring the frequency of the second oscillator. Despite the fundamental tradeoff between the coupling strength $g$ and maximum photon storage capacity of the oscillators, it is possible to achieve high fidelity detection of up to 10 photons over time scale of the order of microseconds…
