Several proposed techniques for distinguishing between optical coherent states are analyzed under a physically realistic model of photodetection. Quantum error probabilities are derived for the Kennedy receiver, the Dolinar receiver and the unitary rotation scheme proposed by Sasaki and Hirota for sub-unity detector efficiency. Monte carlo simulations are performed to assess the effects of detector dark counts, dead time, signal processing bandwidth and phase noise in the communication channel. The feedback strategy employed by the Dolinar receiver is found to achieve the Helstrom bound for sub-unity detection efficiency and to provide robustness to these other detector imperfections making it more attractive for laboratory implementation than previously believed.
We propose a method of an improving quality of a ring cavity which is imperfect due to non-unit mirror reflectivity. The method is based on using squeezed states of light pulses illuminating the mirror and gradual homodyne detection of a radiation escaping from the cavity followed by single displacement and single squeezing operation performed on the released state. We discuss contribution of this method in process of storing unknown coherent and known squeezed state and generation of squeezing in the optical ring cavities.
Chiral molecules with broken parity symmetries can be modeled as quantum systems with cyclic-transition structures. By using these novel properties, we design two-step laser pulses to distinguish left- and right-handed molecules from the enantiomers. After the applied pulse drivings, one kind chiral molecules are trapped in coherent population trapping state, while the other ones are pumped to the highest states for ionizations. Then, different chiral molecules can be separated.
It is generally assumed that on-off detectors with single-photon sensitivity cannot distinguish coherent states from phase-mixed coherent states without some form of quadrature-based tomography. Here, we show that it is theoretically possible to distinguish these states without quadrature-based methods by comparing the vacuum probability of one output port of a variable beam splitter (VBS) that has two different phase-mixed coherent states as its inputs to the well-known case of dual coherent-state inputs. As an application, a method is proposed to test whether a laser field is in a coherent s…
A double-rephasing photon-echo (DRPE) scheme inherently satisfies no-population inversion condition for quantum memory applications, while the resultant absorptive coherence prohibits echo radiation out of the medium. To solve the absorptive echo problem in the DRPE scheme, a controlled double-rephasing echo protocol has been presented and discussed for the collective atom phase control. In the DRPE scheme, however, a typical Gaussian light can cause imperfect rephasing processes resulting in a partial emission of photon echoes. Here, the rephasing process of individual ensemble atoms is thoro…
We study analytically the dynamics of cavity QED nodes in a practical quantum network. Given a single 3-level $Λ$-type atom or quantum dot coupled to a micro-cavity, we derive several necessary and sufficient criteria for the coherent trapping and generation of a single photon pulse with a given waveform to be realizable. We prove that these processes can be performed with practical hardware -- such as cavity QED systems which are operating deep in the weak coupling regime -- given a set of restrictions on the single-photon pulse envelope. We systematically study the effects of spontaneous emi…
Because of the potential applications in quantum information processing tasks, discrimination of binary coherent states using generalized Kennedy receiver with maximum a posteriori probability (MAP) detection has attracted increasing attentions in recent years. In this paper, we analytically study the performance of the generalized Kennedy receiver having optimally displaced threshold detection (ODTD) in a realistic situation with noises and imperfect devices. We first prove that the MAP detection for a generalized Kennedy receiver is equivalent to a threshold detection in this realistic situa…
In the cavity-QED architecture, photon number fluctuations from residual cavity photons cause qubit dephasing due to the AC Stark effect. These unwanted photons originate from a variety of sources, such as thermal radiation, leftover measurement photons, and crosstalk. Using a capacitively-shunted flux qubit coupled to a transmission line cavity, we demonstrate a method that identifies and distinguishes coherent and thermal photons based on noise-spectral reconstruction from time-domain spin-locking relaxometry. Using these measurements, we attribute the limiting dephasing source in our system…
We address the security of continuous-variable quantum key distribution with squeezed states upon realistic conditions of noisy and lossy environment and limited reconciliation efficiency. Considering the generalized preparation scheme and clearly distinguishing between classical and quantum resources, we investigate the effect of finite squeezing on the tolerance of the protocol to untrusted channel noise. For a long-distance strongly attenuating channel and the consequent low reconciliation efficiency, we show that feasible limited squeezing is surprisingly sufficient to provide the security…
We study experimentally various physical limitations and technical imperfections that lead to damping and finite contrast of optically-driven Rabi oscillations between ground and Rydberg states of a single atom. Finite contrast is due to preparation and detection errors and we show how to model and measure them accurately. Part of these errors originates from the finite lifetime of Rydberg states and we observe its $n^3$-scaling with the principal quantum number $n$. To explain the damping of Rabi oscillations, we use simple numerical models, taking into account independently measured experime…
Coherent Tunneling Adiabatic Passage (CTAP) has been proposed as a long-range physical qubit transport mechanism in solid-state quantum computing architectures. Although the mechanism can be implemented in either a chain of quantum dots or donors, a 1D chain of donors in Si is of particular interest due to the natural confining potential of donors that can in principle help reduce the gate densities in solid-state quantum computing architectures. Using detailed atomistic modeling, we investigate CTAP in a more realistic triple donor system in the presence of inevitable fabrication imperfection…
We propose a scheme for optimal Gaussian purification of coherent states from several imperfect copies. The proposal is experimentally demonstrated for the case of two copies of a coherent state sent through independent noisy channels. Our purification protocol relies on only linear optics and an ancilla vacuum state, rendering this approach an interesting alternative to the more complex protocols of entanglement distillation and quantum error correction.
We present a scheme to conditionally generate an arbitrary superposition of a pair of coherent states from a squeezed vacuum by means of the modified photon subtraction where a coherent state ancilla and two on/off type detectors are used. We show that, even including realistic imperfections of the detectors, our scheme can generate a target state with a high fidelity. The amplitude of the generated states can be amplified by conditional homodyne detections.
The availability of Bose-Einstein condensates as mesoscopic or macroscopic quantum objects has aroused new interest in the possiblity of making and detecting coherent superpositions involving many atoms. In this article we show that it may be possible to generate such a superposition state in a reasonably short time using Feshbach resonances to tune the inter-atomic interactions in a double-well condensate. We also consider the important problem of distinguishing whether a coherent superposition or a statistical mixture is generated by a given experimental procedure. We find that unambiguously…
It is generally assumed that every process in quantum physics can be described mathematically by a completely positive map. However, experimentally reconstructed processes are not necessarily completely positive due to statistical or systematic errors. In this paper, we introduce a test for discriminating statistical from systematic errors which is necessary to interpret experimentally reconstructed, non-completely positive maps.Wedemonstrate the significance of the test using several examples given by experiments and simulations. In particular, we demonstrate experimentally how an initial cor…
We study the performance of quantum error correction codes (QECCs) under the detection-induced coherent error due to the imperfectness of practical implementations of stabilizer measurements, after running a quantum circuit. Considering the most promising surface code, we find that the detection-induced coherent error will result in undetected error terms, which will accumulate and evolve into logical errors. However, we show that such errors will be alleviated by increasing the code size, akin to eliminating other types of errors discussed previously. We also find that with detection-induced …
We prove the security of the Bennett-Brassard (BB84) quantum key distribution protocol in the case where the source and detector are under the limited control of an adversary. Our proof applies when both the source and the detector have small basis-dependent flaws, as is typical in practical implementations of the protocol. We derive a general lower bound on the asymptotic key generation rate for weakly basis-dependent eavesdropping attacks, and also estimate the rate in some special cases: sources that emit weak coherent states with random phases, detectors with basis-dependent efficiency, an…
The introduction of phase coherence in the detection of quantum noise of light yields a pure quantum measurement of spectral modes. We theoretically show that such coherent quantum measurement performed with the technique of resonator detection (RD) is able to access any direction in the two-mode phase space of spectral sidebands under appropriate conditions, thus furnishing a complete measurement of the four-dimensional Wigner function. We obtain a realistic measurement operator for coherent RD by including the effects of imperfect resonator mode matching in our analysis. Moreover, we experim…
We show that a Bell inequality test using an optical hybrid state between a polarized single photon and a coherent field can be highly robust against detection inefficiency. The Bell violation occurs until the efficiency becomes as low as 67% even though its degree becomes small as the detection efficiency degrades. We consider on/off and photon number parity measurements, respectively, for the Bell test and they result in the similar conditions. If the detection efficiency is higher than 98.68%, parity measurements give larger Bell violations close to Cirel'son's bound, while on/off measureme…
We propose a scheme for the deterministic coherent manipulation of two atomic qutrits, trapped in separate cavities coupled through a short optical fibre or optical resonator. We study such a system in the regime of dispersive atom-field interactions, where the dynamics of atoms, cavities and fibre operates through virtual population of both the atomic excited states and photonic states in the cavities and fibre. We show that the resulting effective dynamics allows for the creation of robust qutrit entanglement, and thoroughly investigate the influence of imperfections and dissipation, due to …
It is shown that a linear superposition of two macroscopically distinguishable optical coherent states can be generated using a single photon source and simple all-optical operations. Weak squeezing on a single photon, beam mixing with an auxiliary coherent state, and photon detecting with imperfect threshold detectors are enough to generate a coherent state superposition in a free propagating optical field with a large coherent amplitude ($α>2$) and high fidelity ($F>0.99$). In contrast to all previous schemes to generate such a state, our scheme does not need photon number resolving measurem…
The Jaynes-Cummings (JC) model is a milestone in the theory of coherent interaction between a two-level system and a single bosonic field mode. This tutorial aims to give a complete description of the model, analyzing the Hamiltonian of the system, its eigenvalues and eigestates, in order to characterize the dynamics of system and subsystems. The Rabi oscillations, together with the collapse and revival effects, are distinguishing features of the JC model and are important for applications in Quantum Information theory. The framework of cavity quantum electrodynamics (cQED) is chosen and two f…
Photosynthetic complexes improve the transfer of excitation energy from peripheral antennas to reaction centers in several ways. In particular, a downward energy funnel can direct excitons in the right direction, while coherent excitonic delocalization can enhance transfer rates through the cooperative phenomenon of supertransfer. However, isolating the role of purely coherent effects is difficult because any change to the delocalization also changes the energy landscape. Here, we show that the relative importance of the two processes can be determined by comparing the natural light-harvesting…
We introduce a fully coherent way for directed transport of localized atoms in optical lattices by regularly performing phase shifts on the lattice potential during the free evolution of the system. This paves the way for realizing a possible cold atom quantum computer in which entangling gates operate by bringing two individual atoms in the proximity of each other and letting them to interact. The speed of our protocol is determined by the tunneling amplitudes of the atoms and thus is much faster than the speed of the dynamics resulted from superexchange interaction in spin chains. Our scheme…
Quantum receiver is an important tool for overcoming the standard quantum limit (SQL) of discrimination errors in optical communication. We theoretically study the quantum receivers for discriminating ternary and quaternary phase shift keyed coherent states in terms of average error rate and mutual information. Our receiver consists of on/off-type photon detectors and displacement operations w/o electrical feedforward operations. We show that for the ternary signals, the receiver shows a reasonable gain from the SQL even without feedforward. This scheme is realizable with the currently availab…
We demonstrate state detection based on coherent Raman repumping and a two-color Raman state transfer. The Raman coupling during detection selectively eliminates unwanted dark states in the fluorescence cycle without compromising the immunity of the desired dark state to off-resonant scattering. We demonstrate this technique using $^{137}\mathrm{Ba}^+$ where a combination of Raman coupling and optical pumping leaves the $D_{3/2}$ $\ket{F"=3,m_F"=3}$ metastable state optically dark and immune to off-resonant scattering. All other states are strongly coupled to the upper $P_{1/2}$ levels. We ach…
We study the phase sensitivity in the conventional $SU(2)$ and nonconventional $SU(1,1)$ interferometers with the coherent and squeezed vacuum input state via the quantum Cramer-Rao bound. We explicitly construct the detection scheme that gives the optimal phase sensitivity. For practical purposes, we show that in the presence of photon loss, both interferometers with proper homodyne detections, are nearly optimal. We also find that unlike the coherent state and squeezed vacuum state, the effects of the imperfect detector on the phase sensitivity cannot be asymptotically removed for a generic …
Many quantum mechanical experiments can be viewed as multi-round interactive protocols between known quantum circuits and an unknown quantum process. Fully quantum "coherent" access to the unknown process is known to provide an advantage in many discrimination tasks compared to when only incoherent access is permitted, but it is unclear if this advantage persists when the process is noisy. Here, we show that a quantum advantage can be maintained when distinguishing between two noisy single qubit rotation channels. Numerical and analytical calculations reveal a distinct transition between optim…
We suggest a technique based on the transfer of topological charge from applied laser radiation to directional and coherent optical fields generated in ladder-type excited atomic media to identify the major processes responsible for their appearance. As an illustration, in Rb vapours we analyse transverse intensity and phase profiles of the forward-directed collimated blue and near-IR light using self-interference and astigmatic transformation techniques when either or both of two resonant laser beams carry orbital angular momentum. Our observations unambiguously demonstrate that emission at 1…
We consider the phase sensing via weak optical coherent state at quantum limit precision. A new detection scheme for the phase estimation is proposed which is inspired by the suboptimal quantum measurement in coherent optical communication. We theoretically analyze a performance of our detection scheme, which we call the displaced-photon counting, for phase sensing in terms of the Fisher information and show that the displaced-photon counting outperforms the static homodyne and heterodyne detections in wide range of the target phase. The proof-of-principle experiment is performed with linear o…
Coherent interactions between quantum emitters in tailored photonic structures is a fundamental building block for future quantum technologies, but remains challenging to observe in complex solid-state environments, where the role of decoherence must be considered. Here, we investigate the optical interaction between two quantum emitters mediated by one-dimensional waveguides in a realistic solid-state environment, focusing on the creation, population and detection of a sub-radiant state, in the presence of dephasing. We show that as dephasing increases, the signatures of sub-radiance quickly …
Emission Dynamics of Rydberg Excitons in $\mathbf{\mathrm{Cu_2O}}$: Distinguishing Second Harmonic Generation from Secondary Emission
Univ Toulouse, INSA Toulouse, CNRS, LPCNO（图卢兹大学，图卢兹国立应用科学学院，法国国家科学研究中心，低维与纳米结构物理实验室）；Department of Physics, Bydgoszcz University of Science and Technology（比得哥什科学技术大学物理系）
The eight-port homodyne detector is an optical circuit designed to perform the monitoring of two quadratures of an optical field, the signal. By using quantum Bose fields and quantum stochastic calculus, we give a complete quantum description of this apparatus, when used as quadrature detector in continuous time. We can treat either the travelling waves in the optical circuit, either the observables involved in the detection part: two couples of photodiodes, postprocessing of the output currents. The analysis includes imperfections, such as not perfectly balanced beam splitters, detector effic…
We theoretically study the quantum receivers with adaptive measurements feedback for discriminating quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) coherent states in terms of average symbol error rate. For rectangular 16-QAM signal set, with different stages of adaptive measurements, the effects of realistic imperfection parameters including the sub-unity quantum efficiency and the dark counts of on-off detectors, as well as the transmittance of beam splitters and the mode mismatch factor between the signal and local oscillating fields on the symbol error rate are separately investigated through Monte …
Continuous-variable quantum key distribution protocols, based on Gaussian modulation of the quadratures of coherent states, have been implemented in recent experiments. A present limitation of such systems is the finite efficiency of the detectors, which can in principle be compensated for by the use of classical optical preamplifiers. Here we study this possibility in detail, by deriving the modified secret key generation rates when an optical parametric amplifier is placed at the output of the quantum channel. After presenting a general set of security proofs, we show that the use of preampl…
We address quantum invisibility in the context of electronics in nanoscale quantum structures. We make use of the freedom of design that quantum corrals provide and show that quantum mechanical objects can be hidden inside the corral, with respect to inelastic electron scattering spectroscopy in combination with scanning tunneling microscopy, and we propose a design strategy. A simple illustration of the invisibility is given in terms of an elliptic quantum corral containing a molecule, with a local vibrational mode, at one of the foci. Our work has implications to quantum information technolo…
Quantum technologies are built on the power of coherent superposition. Atomic coherence is typically generated from optical coherence, most often via Rabi oscillations. However, canonical coherent states of light create imperfect resources; a fully-quantized description of "$\tfracπ{2}$ pulses" shows that the atomic superpositions generated remain entangled with the light. We show that there are quantum states of light that generate coherent atomic states perfectly, with no residual atom-field entanglement. These states can be found for arbitrarily short times and approach slightly-number-sque…
We demonstrate a general method for state detection of trapped ions that can be applied to a large class of atomic and molecular species. We couple a "spectroscopy" ion (Al+) to a "control" ion (Mg+) in the same trap and perform state detection through off-resonant laser excitation of the spectroscopy ion that induces coherent motion. The motional amplitude, dependent on the spectroscopy ion state, is measured either by time-resolved photon counting, or by resolved sideband excitations on the control ion. The first method provides a simplified way to distinguish "clock" states in Al+, which av…
Resonant tunneling through identical potential barriers is a textbook problem in quantum mechanics. Its solution yields total transparency (100% tunneling) at discrete energies. This dramatic phenomenon results from coherent interference among many trajectories, and it is the basis of transport through periodic structures. Resonant tunneling of electrons is commonly seen in semiconducting 'quantum dots'. Here we demonstrate that detecting (distinguishing) electron trajectories in a quantum dot (QD) renders the QD nearly insulating. We couple trajectories in the QD to a 'detector' by employing …
Increased cyclicity of atomic transitions via coherent interference of decay paths
Chicago Quantum Institute, University of Chicago（芝加哥大学芝加哥量子研究所）；Materials Science Division, Argonne National Laboratory（阿贡国家实验室材料科学部）；HUN-REN Wigner Research Centre for Physics（匈牙利科学院Wigner物理研究中心）；Department of Atomic Physics, Institute of Physics, Budapest University of Technology and Economics（布达佩斯科技大学物理系原子物理学科）；MTA–WFK Lendület “Momentum” Semiconductor Nanostructures Research Group（匈牙利科学院- WFK lendület“动量”半导体纳米结构研究组）
