1,698 research outputs found
On the measurement of a weak classical force coupled to a quantum-mechanical oscillator. I. Issues of principle
The monitoring of a quantum-mechanical harmonic oscillator on which a classical force acts is important in a variety of high-precision experiments, such as the attempt to detect gravitational radiation. This paper reviews the standard techniques for monitoring the oscillator, and introduces a new technique which, in principle, can determine the details of the force with arbitrary accuracy, despite the quantum properties of the oscillator. The standard method for monitoring the oscillator is the "amplitude-and-phase" method (position or momentum transducer with output fed through a narrow-band amplifier). The accuracy obtainable by this method is limited by the uncertainty principle ("standard quantum limit"). To do better requires a measurement of the type which Braginsky has called "quantum nondemolition." A well known quantum nondemolition technique is "quantum counting," which can detect an arbitrarily weak classical force, but which cannot provide good accuracy in determining its precise time dependence. This paper considers extensively a new type of quantum nondemolition measurement—a "back-action-evading" measurement of the real part X_1 (or the imaginary part X_2) of the oscillator's complex amplitude. In principle X_1 can be measured "arbitrarily quickly and arbitrarily accurately," and a sequence of such measurements can lead to an arbitrarily accurate monitoring of the classical force. The authors describe explicit Gedanken experiments which demonstrate that X_1 can be measured arbitrarily quickly and arbitrarily accurately. In these experiments the measuring apparatus must be coupled to both the position (position transducer) and the momentum (momentum transducer) of the oscillator, and both couplings must be modulated sinusoidally. For a given measurement time the strength of the coupling determines the accuracy of the measurement; for arbitrarily strong coupling the measurement can be arbitrarily accurate. The "momentum transducer" is constructed by combining a "velocity transducer" with a "negative capacitor" or "negative spring." The modulated couplings are provided by an external, classical generator, which can be realized as a harmonic oscillator excited in an arbitrarily energetic, coherent state. One can avoid the use of two transducers by making "stroboscopic measurements" of X_1, in which one measures position (or momentum) at half-cycle intervals. Alternatively, one can make "continuous single-transducer" measurements of X_1 by modulating appropriately the output of a single transducer (position or momentum), and then filtering the output to pick out the information about X_1 and reject information about X_2. Continuous single-transducer measurements are useful in the case of weak coupling. In this case long measurement times are required to achieve good accuracy, and continuous single-transducer measurements are almost as good as perfectly coupled two-transducer measurements. Finally, the authors develop a theory of quantum nondemolition measurement for arbitrary systems. This paper (Paper I) concentrates on issues of principle; a sequel (Paper II) will consider issues of practice
Classical phase-space descriptions of continuous-variable teleportation
The nonnegative Wigner function of all quantum states involved in
teleportation of Gaussian states using the standard continuous-variable
teleportation protocol means that there is a local realistic phase-space
description of the process. This includes the coherent states teleported up to
now in experiments. We extend the phase-space description to teleportation of
non-Gaussian states using the standard protocol and conclude that teleportation
of non-Gaussian states with fidelity of 2/3 is a "gold standard" for this kind
of teleportation.Comment: New version contains minor changes requested by journal referee
Entanglement and bifurcations in Jahn-Teller models
We compare and contrast the entanglement in the ground state of two
Jahn-Teller models. The system models the coupling of a
two-level electronic system, or qubit, to a single oscillator mode, while the
models the qubit coupled to two independent, degenerate
oscillator modes. In the absence of a transverse magnetic field applied to the
qubit, both systems exhibit a degenerate ground state. Whereas there always
exists a completely separable ground state in the system, the
ground states of the model always exhibit entanglement. For
the case we aim to clarify results from previous work, alluding
to a link between the ground state entanglement characteristics and a
bifurcation of a fixed point in the classical analogue. In the
case we make use of an ansatz for the ground state. We
compare this ansatz to exact numerical calculations and use it to investigate
how the entanglement is shared between the three system degrees of freedom.Comment: 11 pages, 9 figures, comments welcome; 2 references adde
Transverse confinement in stochastic cooling of trapped atoms
Stochastic cooling of trapped atoms is considered for a laser-beam
configuration with beam waists equal or smaller than the extent of the atomic
cloud. It is shown, that various effects appear due to this transverse
confinement, among them heating of transverse kinetic energy. Analytical
results of the cooling in dependence on size and location of the laser beam are
presented for the case of a non-degenerate vapour.Comment: 14 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication in Journal of Optics
Improving Detectors Using Entangling Quantum Copiers
We present a detection scheme which using imperfect detectors, and imperfect
quantum copying machines (which entangle the copies), allows one to extract
more information from an incoming signal, than with the imperfect detectors
alone.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, REVTeX, to be published in Phys. Rev.
Quantum Mechanics and Linearized Gravitational Waves
The interaction of classical gravitational waves (GW) with matter is studied
within a quantum mechanical framework. The classical equations of motion in the
long wave-length limit is quantized and a Schroedinger equation for the
interaction of GW with matter is proposed. Due to its quadrapole nature, the GW
interacts with matter by producing squeezed quantum states. The resultant
hamiltonian is quite different from one would expect from general principles,
however. The interaction of GW with the free particle, the harmonic oscillator
and the hydrogen atom is then studied using this hamiltonian.Comment: 24 pages, written in REVTE
Chaos for Liouville probability densities
Using the method of symbolic dynamics, we show that a large class of
classical chaotic maps exhibit exponential hypersensitivity to perturbation,
i.e., a rapid increase with time of the information needed to describe the
perturbed time evolution of the Liouville density, the information attaining
values that are exponentially larger than the entropy increase that results
from averaging over the perturbation. The exponential rate of growth of the
ratio of information to entropy is given by the Kolmogorov-Sinai entropy of the
map. These findings generalize and extend results obtained for the baker's map
[R. Schack and C. M. Caves, Phys. Rev. Lett. 69, 3413 (1992)].Comment: 26 pages in REVTEX, no figures, submitted to Phys. Rev.
Qudit Quantum State Tomography
Recently quantum tomography has been proposed as a fundamental tool for
prototyping a few qubit quantum device. It allows the complete reconstruction
of the state produced from a given input into the device. From this
reconstructed density matrix, relevant quantum information quantities such as
the degree of entanglement and entropy can be calculated. Generally orthogonal
measurements have been discussed for this tomographic reconstruction. In this
paper, we extend the tomographic reconstruction technique to two new regimes.
First we show how non-orthogonal measurement allow the reconstruction of the
state of the system provided the measurements span the Hilbert space. We then
detail how quantum state tomography can be performed for multi qudits with a
specific example illustrating how to achieve this in one and two qutrit
systems.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, submitted to PR
Quantum nondemolition measurements via quantum counting
For a harmonic-oscillator gravitational-wave detector, we show that a quantum nondemolition measurement of the square of the number operator may be made by coupling the detector to an oscillator readout via a quadratic interaction, as in optical four-wave mixing. Explicit evaluation of the effect of a meter readout on the detector demonstrates the possibility of arbitrarily accurate instantaneous measurements for sufficiently large coupling strength
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