Explanation and observability of diffraction in time

Diffraction in time (DIT) is a fundamental phenomenon in quantum dynamics due to time-dependent obstacles and slits. It is formally analogous to diffraction of light, and is expected to play an increasing role to design coherent matter wave sources, as in the atom laser, to analyze time-of-flight information and emission from ultrafast pulsed excitations, and in applications of coherent matter waves in integrated atom-optical circuits. We demonstrate that DIT emerges robustly in quantum waves emitted by an exponentially decaying source and provide a simple explanation of the phenomenon, as an interference of two characteristic velocities. This allows for its controllability and optimization.Comment: 4 pages, 6 figure

Quantum neural networks with multi-qubit potentials

We propose quantum neural networks that include multi-qubit interactions in the neural potential leading to a reduction of the network depth without losing approximative power. We show that the presence of multi-qubit potentials in the quantum perceptrons enables more efficient information processing tasks such as XOR gate implementation and prime numbers search, while it also provides a depth reduction to construct distinct entangling quantum gates like CNOT, Toffoli, and Fredkin. This simplification in the network architecture paves the way to address the connectivity challenge to scale up a quantum neural network while facilitates its training.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figure

Fast and robust spin manipulation in a quantum dot by electric fields

We apply an invariant-based inverse engineering method to control by time-dependent electric fields electron spin dynamics in a quantum dot with spin-orbit coupling in a weak magnetic field. The designed electric fields provide a shortcut to adiabatic processes that flips the spin rapidly, thus avoiding decoherence effects. This approach, being robust with respect to the device-dependent noise, can open new possibilities for the spin-based quantum information processing.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figures, with supplemental material. Errors in the published version have been correcte

Pulse Control of Decoherence in a Qubit Coupled with a Quantum Environment

We study the time evolution of a qubit linearly coupled with a quantum environment under a sequence of short pi pulses. Our attention is focused on the case where qubit-environment interactions induce the decoherence with population decay. We assume that the environment consists of a set of bosonic excitations. The time evolution of the reduced density matrix for the qubit is calculated in the presence of periodic short pi pulses. We confirm that the decoherence is suppressed if the pulse interval is shorter than the correlation time for qubit-environment interactions.Comment: 5 pages, 2figure

SPORT: A new sub-nanosecond time-resolved instrument to study swift heavy ion-beam induced luminescence - Application to luminescence degradation of a fast plastic scintillator

We developed a new sub-nanosecond time-resolved instrument to study the dynamics of UV-visible luminescence under high stopping power heavy ion irradiation. We applied our instrument, called SPORT, on a fast plastic scintillator (BC-400) irradiated with 27-MeV Ar ions having high mean electronic stopping power of 2.6 MeV/\mu m. As a consequence of increasing permanent radiation damages with increasing ion fluence, our investigations reveal a degradation of scintillation intensity together with, thanks to the time-resolved measurement, a decrease in the decay constant of the scintillator. This combination indicates that luminescence degradation processes by both dynamic and static quenching, the latter mechanism being predominant. Under such high density excitation, the scintillation deterioration of BC-400 is significantly enhanced compared to that observed in previous investigations, mainly performed using light ions. The observed non-linear behaviour implies that the dose at which luminescence starts deteriorating is not independent on particles' stopping power, thus illustrating that the radiation hardness of plastic scintillators can be strongly weakened under high excitation density in heavy ion environments.Comment: 5 figures, accepted in Nucl. Instrum. Methods

Measurement does not always aid state discrimination

We have investigated the problem of discriminating between nonorthogonal quantum states with least probability of error. We have determined that the best strategy for some sets of states is to make no measurement at all, and simply to always assign the most commonly occurring state. Conditions which describe such sets of states have been derived.Comment: 3 page