Influence of an indefinite causal order on an Otto heat engine

The quantum effect plays an important role in quantum thermodynamics, and recently the application of an indefinite causal order to quantum thermodynamics has attracted much attention. Based on two trapped ions, we propose a scheme to add an indefinite causal order to the isochoric cooling stroke of an Otto engine through reservoir engineering. Then, we observe that the quasi-static efficiency of this heat engine is far beyond the efficiency of a normal Otto heat engine and may reach one. When the power is its maximum, the efficiency is also much higher than that of a normal Otto heat engine. This enhancement may originate from the non-equilibrium of the reservoir and the measurement on the control qubit.     

Enhancement of feasibility of macroscopic quantum superposition state with the quantum Rabi-Stark model

We propose an efficient scheme to generate a macroscopical quantum superposition state with a cavity optomechanical system, which is composed of a quantum Rabi-Stark model coupling to a mechanical oscillator. In a low-energy subspace of the Rabi-Stark model, the dressed states and then the effective Hamiltonian of the system are given. Due to the coupling of the mechanical oscillator and the atom-cavity system, if the initial state of the atom-cavity system is one of the dressed states, the mechanical oscillator will evolve into a corresponding coherent state. Thus, if the initial state of the atom-cavity system is a superposition of two dressed states, a coherent state superposition of the mechanical oscillator can be generated. The quantum coherence and their distinguishable properties of the two coherent states are exhibited by Wigner distribution. We show that the Stark term can enhance significantly the feasibility and quantum coherence of the generated macroscopic quantum superposition state of the oscillator.     

Quantum statistics of phonon radiations in optomechanical systems

We study the correlation statistics of phonon radiations in a weakly driven optomechanical system. Three dominated scattering processes are identified by the scattering theory analytically and the master equation numerically, whose interplay determines the phonon statistical properties. Our results show that for the large detuning, the driving field off-resonant with the system induces a small emission rate of two anti-bunched phonons. For the resonant driving field, there is a relatively large emission rate of two bunched phonons.     

Realizing number recognition with simulated quantum semi-restricted Boltzmann machine

Quantum machine learning based on quantum algorithms may achieve an exponential speedup over classical algorithms in dealing with some problems such as clustering. In this paper, we use the method of training the lower bound of the average log likelihood function on the quantum Boltzmann machine (QBM) to recognize the handwritten number datasets and compare the training results with classical models. We find that, when the QBM is semi-restricted, the training results get better with fewer computing resources. This shows that it is necessary to design a targeted algorithm to speed up computation and save resources.     

Gravity-induced geometric spin Hall effect of freely falling quantum particle

We discuss a new gravitational effect that the wave packet of a free-fall quantum particle undergoes a spin-dependent transverse shift in Earth's gravitational field. This effect is similar to the geometric spin Hall effect (GSHE) (Aiello 2009 et al Phys. Rev. Lett. 103 100401 ), and can be called gravity-induced GSHE. This effect suggests that the free-fall wave packets of opposite spin-polarized quantum particles can be split in the direction perpendicular to spin and gravity.     

Simultaneous two-way classical communication and measurement-device-independent quantum key distribution on oceanic quantum channels

Simultaneous two-way classical and quantum (STCQ) communication combines both continuous classical coherent optical communication and continuous-variable quantum key distribution (CV-QKD), which eliminates all detection-related imperfections by being measurement-device-independent (MDI). In this paper, we propose a protocol relying on STCQ communication on the oceanic quantum channel, in which the superposition-modulation-based coherent states depend on the information bits of both the secret key and the classical communication ciphertext. We analyse the encoding combination in classical communication and consider the probability distribution transmittance under seawater turbulence with various interference factors. Our numerical simulations of various practical scenarios demonstrate that the proposed protocol can simultaneously enable two-way classical communication and CV-MDI QKD with just a slight performance degradation transmission distance compared to the original CV-MDI QKD scheme. Moreover, the asymmetric situation outperforms the symmetric case in terms of transmission distance and optical modulation variance. We further take into consideration the impact of finite-size effects to illustrate the applicability of the proposed scheme in practical scenarios. The results show the feasibility of the underwater STCQ scheme, which contributes toward developing a global quantum communication network in free space.     

Quantum thermal field fluctuation induced corrections to the interaction between two ground-state atoms

We generalize the formalism proposed by Dalibard, Dupont-Roc, and Cohen-Tannoudji (the DDC formalism) in the fourth order for two atoms in interaction with scalar fields in vacuum to a thermal bath at finite temperature T, and then calculate the interatomic interaction energy of two ground-state atoms separately in terms of the contributions of thermal fluctuations and the radiation reaction of the atoms and analyze in detail the thermal corrections to the van der Waals and Casimir–Polder interactions. We discover a particular region, i.e. $\sqrt[4]{{\lambda }^{3}\beta }\ll L\ll \lambda $ with L, β and λ denoting the interatomic separation, the wavelength of thermal photons and the transition wavelength of the atoms respectively, where the thermal corrections remarkably render the van der Waals force, which is usually attractive, repulsive, leading to an interesting crossover phenomenon of the interatomic interaction from attractive to repulsive as the temperature increases. We also find that the thermal corrections cause significant changes to the Casimir–Polder force when the temperature is sufficiently high, resulting in an attractive force proportional to TL⁻³ in the λ ≪ β ≪ L region, and a force that can be either attractive or repulsive and even vanishing in the β ≪ λ ≪ L region depending on the interatomic separation.     

Excitation spectra of one-dimensional spin-1/2 Fermi gas with an attraction

Using an exact Bethe ansatz solution, we rigorously study excitation spectra of the spin-1/2 Fermi gas (called Yang–Gaudin model) with an attractive interaction. Elementary excitations of this model involve particle-hole excitation, hole excitation and adding particles in the Fermi seas of pairs and unpaired fermions. The gapped magnon excitations in the spin sector show a ferromagnetic coupling to the Fermi sea of the single fermions. By numerically and analytically solving the Bethe ansatz equations and the thermodynamic Bethe ansatz equations of this model, we obtain excitation energies for various polarizations in the phase of the Fulde–Ferrell–Larkin–Ovchinnikov-like state. For a small momentum (long-wavelength limit) and in the strong interaction regime, we analytically obtained their linear dispersions with curvature corrections, effective masses as well as velocities in particle-hole excitations of pairs and unpaired fermions. Such a type of particle-hole excitations display a novel separation of collective motions of bosonic modes within paired and unpaired fermions. Finally, we also discuss magnon excitations in the spin sector and the application of Bragg spectroscopy for testing such separated charge excitation modes of pairs and single fermions.     

Introduction and Analysis of a Method for the Investigation of QCD-like Tree Data

The properties of decays that take place during jet formation cannot be easily deduced from the final distribution of particles in a detector. In this work, we first simulate a system of particles with well-defined masses, decay channels, and decay probabilities. This presents the “true system” for which we want to reproduce the decay probability distributions. Assuming we only have the data that this system produces in the detector, we decided to employ an iterative method which uses a neural network as a classifier between events produced in the detector by the “true system” and some arbitrary “test system”. In the end, we compare the distributions obtained with the iterative method to the “true” distributions.