In this thesis concrete quantum systems are investigated in the framework of the environment induced decoherence. The focus is on the dynamics of highly nonclassical quantum states, the Wigner function of which are negative over some regions of their domains. One of the chosen physical systems is a diatomic molecule, where the potential energy of the nuclei is an anharmonic function of their distance. A system of two-level atoms, which can be important from the viewpoint of quantum information technology, is also investigated. A method is described that is valid in both systems and can determine the characteristic time of the decoherence in a dynamical way. The direction of the decoherence and its relation to energy dissipation is also studied. Finally, a scheme is proposed that can prepare decoherence-free states using the experimental techniques presently available.
We investigate nonclassical properties of the output of a Bose-Einstein condensate in Milburn's model of intrinsic decoherence. It is shown that the squeezing property of the atom laser is suppressed due to decoherence. Nevertheless, if some very special conditions were satisfied, the squeezing properties of atom laser could be robust against the decoherence.
The decoherence of nonclassical motional states of a trapped $^9 {\rm Be^+}$ ion in a recent experiment is investigated theoretically. Sources of decoherence considered here destroy the characteristic coherent quantum dynamics of the system but do not cause energy dissipation. Here they are first introduced phenomenologically and then described using a microscopic Hamiltonian formulation. Theoretical predictions are compared to experimental results.
There are quantum states of light that can be expressed as finite superpositions of Fock states (FSFS). We demonstrate the nonclassicality of an arbitrary FSFS by means of its phase space distributions such as the Wigner function and the $Q$-function. The decoherence of the FSFS is studied by considering the time evolution of its Wigner function in amplitude decay and phase damping channels. As examples, we determine the nonclassicality and decoherence of generalized and reciprocal binomial states.
We make a comparative study of quadrature squeezing, photon-number distribution and Wigner function in a decayed quantum system. Specifically, for a field mode prepared initially in cat states interacting with a zero-temperature environment, we show that the rate of reduction of the nonclassical effects in this system is proportional to the occurrence of the decoherence process.
Theoretical analysis is given of nonclassicality and decoherence of the field states generated by adding any number of photons to the squeezed thermal state (STS). Based on the fact that the squeezed number state can be considered as a single-variable Hermite polynomial excited state, the compact expression of the normalization factor is derived, a Legendre polynomial. The nonclassicality is investigated by exploring the sub-Poissonian and negative Wigner function (WF). The results show that the WF of single photon-added STS (PASTS) always has negative values at the phase space center. The dec…
We discuss nonclassical properties of single-photon subtracted squeezed vacuum states in terms of the sub-Poissonian statistics and the negativity of the Wigner function. We derive a compact expression for the Wigner function from which we find the region of phase space where Wigner function is negative. We find an upper bound on the squeezing parameter for the state to exhibit sub-Poissonian statistics. We then study the effect of decoherence on the single-photon subtracted squeezed states. We present results for two different models of decoherence, viz. amplitude decay model and the phase di…
We introduce Hermite polynomial excitation squeezed vacuum (SV) H_{n}(O)S(r)|0> with O=u a+v a^{+}. We investigate analytically the nonclassical properties according to Mandel's Q parameter, second correlation function, squeezing effect and the negativity of Wigner function (WF). It is found that all these nonclassicalities can be enhanced by H_{n}(O)operation and adjustable parameters u and v. In particular, the optimal negative volume delta_{opt}of WF can be achieved by modulating u and v for n>=2,while delta is kept unchanged for n=1. Furthermore, the decoherence effect of phase-sensitive e…
We study the nonclassicality of photon-added squeezed vacuum (PASV) and its decoherence in thermal environment in terms of the sub-Poissonian statistics and the negativity of Wigner function (WF). By converting the PASV to a squeezed Hermite polynomial excitation state, we derive a compact expression for the normalization factor of m-PASV, which is an m-order Legendre polynomial of squeezing parameter r. We also derive the explicit expression of WF of m-PASV and find the negative region of WF in phase space. We show that there is an upper bound value of r for this state to exhibit sub-Poissoni…
We theoretically introduce a new kind of non-Gaussian state-----Laguerre polynomial excited coherent states by using the multiphoton catalysis which actually can be considered as a block comprising photon number operator. It is found that the normalized factor is related to the two-variable Hermite polynomials. We then investigate the nonclassical properties in terms of Mandel's Q parameter, quadrature squeezing, second correlation, and the negativity of Wigner function (WF). It is shown that all these properties are related to the amplitude of coherent state, catalysis number and unbalanced b…
A quantum memory interacts with its environment and loses information via decoherence as well as incoherence. A robust quantum control that prepares, preserves, and manipulates nonclassical correlations even in the presence of environmental influence is of paramount importance in quantum information processing. A well-known technique to suppress decoherence, namely Dynamical Decoupling (DD), consists of a sequence of rapid flips applied to the system in order to refocus the system-environment interactions. In this work, we integrate DD with quantum gates using optimal control techniques to rea…
Characteristic functions are shown to be useful for highly sensitive measurements. Redistributions of motional Fock states of a trapped atom can be directly monitored via the most fragile nonclassical part of the characteristic function. The method can also be used for decoherence measurements in optical quantum-information systems.
We study dynamics of nonclassical correlations by exactly solving a model consisting of two atomic qubits with spontaneous emission. We find that the nonclassical correlations defined by different measures give different qualitative characterizations of those correlations. The relative behaviors of those correlation measures are presented explicitly for various quantum states in the two-qubit atomic system. In particular, we find that the robustness of quantum correlations can be greatly enhanced by performing appropriate local unitary operations on the initial state of the system.
We study the open system dynamics of a circuit QED model operating in the ultrastrong coupling regime. If the resonator is pumped periodically in time the underlying classical system is chaotic. Indeed, the periodically driven Jaynes-Cummings model in the Born-Oppenheimer approximation resembles a Duffing oscillator which in the classical limit is a well-known example of a chaotic system. Detection of the field quadrature of the output field acts as an effective position measurement of the oscillator. We address how such detection affects the quantum chaotic evolution in this bipartite system.…
We use photon counters to obtain the joint photon counting statistics from twin-beam non-degenerate parametric down conversion, and we demonstrate directly, and with no auxiliary assumptions, that these twin beams are nonclassical.
We study the transport and quantum walk of nonclassical light in an array of coupled waveguides which have novel properties like very low decoherence and thus making them ideal for storage of quantum information. We show how squeezing gets turned over from one waveguide to another. We further show how input nonclassical light can generate entanglement among different waveguides. Our results involve both first quantization due to array structure and second quantization due to the quantum nature of fields and can also be used to discuss the Talbot effect in the quantum regime.
It is often asserted that quantum effects can be observed in coincidence detection rates or other correlations, but never in the rate of single-photon detection. We observe nonclassical interference in a singles rate, thanks to the intrinsic nonlinearity of photon counters. This is due to a dependence of the effective detection efficiency on the quantum statistics of the light beam. Such measurements of detector response to photon pairs promise to shed light on the microscopic aspects of silicon photodetectors, and on general issues of quantum measurement and decoherence.
We suggest that propagation of nonclassical light in lattices of optical waveguides can provide a laboratory tool to simulate quantum decoherence phenomena with high non-Markovian features. As examples, we study decoherence of optical Schrödinger cats in a lattice that mimics a dissipative quantum harmonic oscillator coupled to a quantum bath, showing fractional decoherence in the strong coupling regime, and Bloch oscillations of optical Schrödinger cats, where damped revivals of the coherence can be observed.
We present controllable generation of various kinds of highly nonclassical states of light, including the single photon state and superposition states of mesoscopically distinct components. The high nonclassicality of the generated states is measured by the negativity of the Wigner function, which is largest ever observed to our knowledge. Our scheme is based on photon subtraction from a nearly pure squeezed vacuum, generated from an optical parametric oscillator with a periodically-poled KTiOPO$_4$ crystal as a nonlinear medium. This is an important step to realize basic elements of universal…
We propose a legitimate and easily computable nonclassicality indicator for the states of electromagnetic fields based on the standard deviation in the measurement of the homodyne rotated quadrature operator. The proposed nonclassicality indicator is the nonclassical area projected by the optical tomogram of the quantum state of light on the optical tomographic plane. If the nonclassical area projected by the optical tomogram of a quantum state is greater than zero, the state is nonclassical, and the area is zero for the pure classical state. It is also noted that the nonclassical area of a qu…
Maximizing Nonclassicality of Massive Objects via Quantum Zeno Effect
Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence（希夫纳达尔卓越学院）；S. N. Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences（S.N. 玻色基础科学国家中心）；Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, University of Ljubljana（卢布尔雅那大学数学与物理学院）；School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Southampton（南安普顿大学物理与天文学院）；Raman Research Institute (RRI)（拉曼研究所）；Bose Institute（玻色研究所）；Department of Physics and Astronomy, University College London（伦敦大学学院物理与天文学系）
Recently some authors have pointed out that there exist nonclassical correlations which are more general, and possibly more fundamental, than entanglement. For these general quantum correlations and their classical counterparts, under the action of decoherence, we identify three general types of dynamics that include a peculiar sudden change in their decay rates. We show that, under suitable conditions, the classical correlation is unaffected by decoherence. Such dynamic behavior suggests an operational measure of both classical and quantum correlations that can be computed without any extremi…
We present a nonlinear decoherence model which models decoherence effect caused by various decohereing sources in a quantum system through a nonlinear coupling between the system and its environment, and apply it to investigating decoherence in nonclassical motional states of a single trapped ion. We obtain an exactly analytic solution of the model and find very good agreement with experimental results for the population decay rate of a single trapped ion observed in the NIST experiments by Meekhof and coworkers (D. M. Meekhof, {\it et al.}, Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 76}, 1796 (1996)).
The influence of decoherence on the fidelity of quantum memories for photonic qubits based on dark-state polaritons in atomic ensembles is discussed. It is shown that despite the large entanglement of the collective storage states corresponding to single photons or nonclassical states of light the sensitivity to decoherence does not scale with the number of atoms. This is due to the existence of equivalence classes of storage states corresponding to states with the same number of dark-state polariton excitations but arbitrary excitations in other polariton modes. Several decoherence processes …
We address the dynamics of nonclassicality for a quantum system interacting with a noisy fluctuating environment described by a classical stochastic field. As a paradigmatic example, we consider a harmonic oscillator initially prepared in a maximally nonclassical state, e.g. a Fock number state or a Schroedinger cat-like state, and then coupled to either resonant or non-resonant external field. Stochastic modeling allows us to describe the decoherence dynamics without resorting to approximated quantum master equations, and to introduce non- Markovian effects in a controlled way. A detailed com…
Recently, de Visser and Blaauboer [Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 96}, 246801 (2006)] proposed the most efficient deterministic teleportation protocol $\cal T$ for electron spins in a semiconductor nanostructure consisting of a single and a double quantum dot. However, it is as yet unknown if $\cal T$ can be completed before decoherence sets in. In this paper we analyze the detrimental effect of nuclear spin baths, the main source of decoherence, on $\cal T$. We show that nonclassical teleportation fidelity can be achieved with $\cal T$ provided certain conditions are met. Our study indicates that real…
We study the loss of quantumness caused by time dilation [1] for a Schrödinger cat state. We give a holistic view of the quantum to classical transition by comparing the dynamics of several nonclassicality indicators, such as the Wigner function interference fringe, the negativity of the Wigner function, the nonclassical depth, the Vogel criterion and the Klyshko criterion. Our results show that only two of these indicators depend critically on the size of the cat, namely on how macroscopic the superposition is. Finally we compare the gravitation-induced decoherence times to the typical decohe…
The continuous transition from a low resolution quantum nondemolition measurement of light field intensity to a precise measurement of photon number is described using a generalized measurement postulate. In the intermediate regime, quantization appears as a weak modulation of measurement probability. In this regime, the measurement result is strongly correlated with the amount of phase decoherence introduced by the measurement interaction. In particular, the accidental observation of half integer photon numbers preserves phase coherence in the light field, while the accidental observation of …
According to Born's rule quantum probabilities are given by the overlap between the system state and measurement states in a quite symmetrical way. This means that both contribute to any observed nonclassical effect that is usually attributed just to the observed light state. This is relevant since typical measurement are highly nonclassical by themselves, such as number states and quadrature eigenstates. We show that nonclassical effects only arise provided that the measurement is itself nonclassical. Otherwise there is a classical-like model accounting for the observed statistics.
The generation of nonclassical states of a radiation field has become increasingly important in the past years given its various applications in quantum communication. The feasibility of generating such nonclassical states has been established in several branches of physics such as cavity electrodynamics, trapped ions, quantum dots, atoms inside cavities and so on. In this sense, we will discuss the issue of the generation of nonclassical states in the context of a superconducting qubit in a microcavity. It has been recently proposed a way to engineer quantum states using a SQUID charge qubit …
We demonstrate the generation of multi-photon quantum states of light by cavity-enhanced parametric down-conversion in the high-repetition-rate pulsed regime. An external enhancement cavity resonant with the spectral comb of modes of a mode-locked pump laser provides a coherent build-up of the pump intensity and greatly enhances the parametric gain without sacrificing its high repetition rate and comb structure. We probe the parametric gain enhancement by the conditional generation and tomographic analysis of two-photon Fock states. Besides its potential impact to efficiently generate highly-n…
We analyze a quantum reservoir engineering method, originally introduced by [Sarlette et al. in Phys. Rev. Lett. 107, 010402 (2011) -- arXiv 1011.5057], for the stabilization of non-classical field states in high quality cavities. We generalize the method to the protection of mesoscopic entangled field states shared by two non-degenerate field modes. The reservoir is made up of a stream of atoms undergoing successive composite interactions with the cavity, each combining resonant with non-resonant parts. We get a detailed insight into the competition between the engineered reservoir and decohe…
Attenuating a quantum state using a beam splitter will introduce noise and decoherence. Here we show that heralding techniques can be used to attenuate Schrödinger cat states and squeezed vacuum states without any noise or decoherence [Mičuda et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 109, 180503 (2012)]. Noiseless attenuation also preserves quantum interference effects in nonclassical states such as squeezed vacuum states.
The quantum statistics of damped higher-order optical solitons are analyzed numerically, using cumulant-expansion techniques in Gaussian approximation. A detailed analysis of nonclassical properties in both the time and the frequency domain is given, with special emphasis on the role of absorption. Highly nonclassical broadband spectral correlation is predicted.
We propose a scheme in which broadband nanostructures allow to generate squeezed light and entanglement of quantum emitters that are extremely far detuned. It is shown that the reduced fluctuations of the electromagnetic field arising from collective resonance fluorescence provide also a means to detect the entanglement between the emitters. Due to the near-field enhancement in the proposed hybrid systems, these nonclassical effects can be encountered outside both the extremely close separations limiting the observation in free space and narrow frequency bands in high-Q cavities. Our approach …
We introduce, for each state of a bosonic quantum field, its quadrature coherence scale (QCS), a measure of the range of its quadrature coherences. Under coupling to a thermal bath, the purity and QCS are shown to decrease on a time scale inversely proportional to the QCS squared. The states most fragile to decoherence are therefore those with quadrature coherences far from the diagonal. We further show a large QCS is difficult to measure since it induces small scale variations in the state's Wigner function. These two observations imply a large QCS constitutes a mark of "macroscopic coherence…
A quantum state is nonclassical if its Glauber-Sudarshan P function fails to be interpreted as a probability density. This quantity is often highly singular, so that its reconstruction is a demanding task. Here we present the experimental determination of a well-behaved P function showing negativities for a single-photon-added thermal state. This is a direct visualization of the original definition of nonclassicality. The method can be useful under conditions for which many other signatures of nonclassicality would not persist.
We present a detailed report on the decoherence of quantum states of continuous variable systems under the action of a quantum optical master equation resulting from the interaction with general Gaussian uncorrelated environments. The rate of decoherence is quantified by relating it to the decay rates of various, complementary measures of the quantum nature of a state, such as the purity, some nonclassicality indicators in phase space and, for two-mode states, entanglement measures and total correlations between the modes. Different sets of physically relevant initial configurations are consid…
Nonclassical states are essential for optics-based quantum information processing, but their fragility limits their utility for practical scenarios in which loss and noise inevitably degrade, if not destroy, nonclassicality. Exploiting nonclassical states in quantum metrology yields sensitivity advantages over all classical schemes delivering the same energy per measurement interval to the sample being probed. These enhancements, almost without exception, are severely diminished by quantum decoherence. Here, we experimentally demonstrate an entanglement-enhanced sensing system that is resilien…
We present a fully quantum mechanical treatment of recent experiments on creation of collective quantum memory and generation of non-classically correlated photon pairs from an atomic ensemble via the protocol of Duan et al. [Nature {\bf 414,} 413(2001)]. The temporal evolution of photon numbers, photon statistics and cross-correlation between the Stokes and anti-Stokes fields is found by solving the equation of motion for atomic spin-wave excitations. We consider a low-finesse cavity model with collectively enhanced signal-to-noise ratio, which remains still considerably large in the free-spa…
Using cumulant expansion in Gaussian approximation, the internal quantum statistics of damped soliton-like pulses in Kerr media are studied numerically, considering both narrow and finite bandwidth spectral pulse components. It is shown that the sub-Poissonian statistics can be enhanced, under certain circumstances, by absorption, which damps out some destructive interferences. Further, it is shown that both the photon-number correlation and the correlation of the photon-number variance between different pulse components can be highly nonclassical even for an absorbing fiber. Optimum frequency…
Excitons in a semiconductor monolayer form a collective resonance that can reflect resonant light with extraordinarily high efficiency. Here, we investigate the nonlinear optical properties of such atomistically thin mirrors and show that finite-range interactions between excitons can lead to the generation of highly non-classical light. We describe two scenarios, in which optical nonlinearities arise either from direct photon coupling to excitons in excited Rydberg states or from resonant two-photon excitation of Rydberg excitons with finite-range interactions. The latter case yields conditio…
It is known that a macroscopic quantum superposition (MQS), when it is exposed to environment, decoheres at a rate scaling with the separation of its component states in phase space. This is more or less consistent with the well known proposition that a more macroscopic quantum state is reduced more quickly to a classical state in general. Effects of initial mixedness, however, on the subsequent decoherence of MQSs have been less known. In this paper, we study the evolution of a highly mixed MQS interacting with an environment, and compare it with that of a pure MQS having the same size of the…
We analyze homodyne detection of macroscopically bright multimode nonclassical states of light and propose their application in quantum communication. We observe that the homodyne detection is sensitive to a mode-matching of the bright light to the highly intense local oscillator. Unmatched bright modes of light result in additional noise which technically limits detection of Gaussian entanglement at macroscopic level. When the mode-matching is sufficient, we show that multimode quantum key distribution with bright beams is feasible. It finally merges the quantum communication with classical o…
There is a common understanding in quantum optics that nonclassical states of light are states that do not have a positive semidefinite and sufficiently regular Glauber-Sudarshan $P$ function. Almost all known nonclassical states have $P$ functions that are highly irregular which makes working with them difficult and direct experimental reconstruction impossible. Here we introduce classes of nonclassical states with regular, non-positive-definite $P$ functions. They are constructed by "puncturing" regular smooth positive $P$ functions with negative Dirac-delta peaks, or other sufficiently narr…
We investigate the decay of entanglement, due to decoherence, of multi-qubit systems that are initially prepared in highly (in some cases maximally) entangled states. We assume that during the decoherence processes each qubit of the system interacts with its own, independent environment. We determine, for systems with a small number of qubits and for various decoherence channels, the initial states exhibiting the most robust entanglement. We also consider a restricted version of this robustness optimization problem, only involving states equivalent under local unitary transformations to the |G…
We investigate two techniques for controlling decoherence, focusing on the crucial role played by the environmental spectrum. We show how environments with different spectra lead to very different dynamical behaviours. Our study clearly proves that such differences must be taken into account when designing decoherence control schemes. The two techniques we consider are reservoir engineering and quantum-Zeno control. We focus on a quantum harmonic oscillator initially prepared in a nonclassical state and derive analytically its non-Markovian dynamics in presence of different bosonic thermal env…
In a numerical study, we investigate the steady-state generation of nonclassical states of light from a coherently driven two-level atom in a one-dimensional waveguide. Specifically, we look for states with a negative Wigner function, since such nonclassical states are a resource for quantum information processing applications, including quantum computing. We find that a waveguide terminated by a mirror at the position of the atom can provide Wigner-negative states, while an infinite waveguide yields strictly positive Wigner functions. Moreover, our investigation reveals a connection between t…
Experimental realization of various quantum states of interest has become possible in the recent past due to the rapid developments in the field of quantum state engineering. Nonclassical properties of such states have led to various exciting applications, specifically in the area of quantum information processing. The present article aims to study lower- and higher-order nonclassical features of such an engineered quantum state (a generalized binomial state based on Abel's formula). Present study has revealed that the state studied here is highly nonclassical. Specifically, higher-order noncl…
Broadband light sources play essential roles in diverse fields, such as high-capacity optical communications, optical coherence tomography, optical spectroscopy, and spectrograph calibration. Though an ultrabroadband nonclassical state from standard spontaneous parametric down-conversion may serve as a quantum counterpart, its detection and quantum characterization have been a challenging task. Here we demonstrate the quantitative characterization of a multimode structure in such an ultrabroadband (150 nm FWHM) squeezed state at telecom wavelength (1.5 μm). The nonclassical photon distribution…
In quantum optics, nonclassical properties of various quantum states of radiation field are frequently studied. Some of those states are finite dimensional and referred to as qudits. These states are important because of their potential applications in quantum information processing. Further, nonclassical states are those which do not have any classical counterpart. Consequently, to establish quantum supremacy, we always require nonclassical state. Recently, Sivakumar and Meher have studied the nonclassical properties of the number state filtered coherent state, and shown that the number state…
