Quantum acoustics with propagating phonons

Surface acoustic waves (SAWs) are mechanical vibrations that propagate on the surface of solids while dissipating little power, consequently enabling them to propagate freely over long distances. The speed and wavelength of SAWs are reduced a five order of magnitude compared to when light is used as a carrier at gigahertz frequencies. The unique properties of SAWs combined with the possibility to let them interact with artificial atoms, discovered and shown for the very first time in appended Paper I of this thesis, open up for exploration of new regimes of quantum physics. The appended Paper II is a book chapter providing an overview of many of the new areas of research, as well as going into depth of the method and significance of the results ofthe appended Paper I.The essential interaction between artificial atoms and SAWs was further investigated by using Autler-Townes splitting to achieve fast control of the interactions. The appended Paper IV, shows a transmitted field extinction of 80 %, and provides proof of concept for a SAW router in the quantum regime. In addition, due to the artificial atom\u27s highly frequency dependent coupling to SAWs, electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) could be observed in the appended Paper V. Furthermore, the EIT region was distinguished from the Autler-Townes splitting region by a threshold in the applied power. The results produce parallel findings to quantum optics, but are perhaps best described as part of a different field, quantum acoustics.Among the many possible areas of research emerging as an outcome of this work, a variety of potential quantum experiments would benefit greatly from a higher conversion efficiency between electric signals and SAWs. Due to this, focus was put on improving this conversion efficiency by studying superconducting unidirectional transducers (UDTs), making use of advances in classical SAW devices. The appended Paper III shows that 99.4~\% of the acoustic power can be focused in a desired direction and that the conversion between electric signals and SAWs is greatly improved by using UDTs, thereby eliminating the largest source of loss of symmetric inter-digital transducers. There is, however, a trade-off between conversion efficiency and bandwidth. This finding allows tailoring of quantum experiments based on SAWs that may pave the way towards measuring quantum sound

Analyzing the Nuclear Interaction: Challenges and New Ideas

This review presents some of the challenges in constructing models of atomic nuclei starting from theoretical descriptions of the strong interaction between nucleons. The focus is on statistical computing and methods for analyzing the link between bulk properties of atomic nuclei, such as radii and binding energies, and the underlying microscopic description of the nuclear interaction. The importance of careful model calibration and uncertainty quantification of theoretical predictions is highlighted

Strong Interactions for Precision Nuclear Physics

One of the key challenges in ab initio nuclear theory is to understand the emergence of nuclear structure from quantum chromodynamics. I will address this challenge and focus on the statistical aspects of uncertainty quantification and parameter estimation in chiral effective field theory

Electromagnetically Induced Acoustic Transparency with a Superconducting Circuit

We report the observation of electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) of a mechanical field, where a superconducting artificial atom is coupled to a 1D-transmission line for surface acoustic waves. An electromagnetic microwave drive is used as the control field, rendering the superconducting transmon qubit transparent to the acoustic probe beam. The strong frequency dependence of the acoustic coupling enables EIT in a ladder configuration due to the suppressed relaxation of the upper level. Our results show that superconducting circuits can be engineered to interact with acoustic fields in parameter regimes not readily accessible to purely electromagnetic systems

Neutron-deuteron scattering cross sections with chiral NN interactions using wave-packet continuum discretization

In this work we present a framework that allows one to solve the Faddeev equations\ua0for three-nucleon scattering using the wave-packet continuum-discretization method. We perform systematic benchmarks using results in the literature and study in detail the convergence of this method with respect to the number of wave packets. We compute several different elastic neutron-deuteron scattering cross-section observables for a variety of energies using chiral nucleon-nucleon interactions. For the optimized next-to-next-to-leading order interaction N2LOopt we find good agreement with data for nucleon scattering-energies ELab≤70 MeV and a slightly larger maximum of the neutron analyzing power Ay(n) at ELab=10 and 21 MeV compared with other interactions. This work represents a first step towards a systematic inclusion of three-nucleon scattering observables in the construction of next-generation nuclear interactions

Bayesian estimation of the low-energy constants up to fourth order in the nucleon-nucleon sector of chiral effective field theory

We use Bayesian methods and Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) sampling to infer the posterior probability density function (PDF) for the low-energy constants (LECs) up to next-to-next-to-next-to-leading order (N3LO) in a chiral effective field theory (χEFT) description of the nucleon-nucleon interaction. In a first step, we condition the inference on neutron-proton and proton-proton scattering data and account for uncorrelated χEFT truncation errors. We demonstrate how to successfully sample the 31-dimensional space of LECs at N3LO using a revised HMC inference protocol. In a second step we extend the analysis by means of importance sampling and an empirical determination of the neutron-neutron scattering length to infer the posterior PDF for the leading charge-dependent contact LEC in the S01 neutron-neutron interaction channel. While doing so we account for the χEFT truncation error via a conjugate prior. We use the resulting posterior PDF to sample the posterior predictive distributions for the effective range parameters in the S01 wave as well as the strengths of charge-symmetry breaking and charge-independence breaking. We conclude that empirical point-estimate results of isospin breaking in the S01 channel are consistent with the PDFs obtained in our Bayesian analysis and that, when accounting for χEFT truncation errors, one must go to next-to-next-to-leading order to confidently detect isospin breaking effects

Bayesian parameter estimation in chiral effective field theory using the Hamiltonian Monte Carlo method

The number of low-energy constants (LECs) in chiral effective field theory (chi EFT) grows rapidly with increasing chiral order, necessitating the use of Markov chain Monte Carlo techniques for sampling their posterior probability density function. For this we introduce a Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) algorithm and sample the LEC posterior up to next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) in the two-nucleon sector of chi EFT. We find that the sampling efficiency of HMC is three to six times higher compared to an affine-invariant sampling algorithm. We analyze the empirical coverage probability and validate that the NNLO model yields predictions for two-nucleon scattering data with largely reliable credible intervals, provided that one ignores the leading-order EFT expansion parameter when inferring the variance of the truncation error. We also find that the NNLO truncation error dominates the error budget

Posterior predictive distributions of neutron-deuteron cross sections

We quantify the posterior predictive distributions (PPDs) of elastic neutron-deuteron (nd) scattering cross sections using nucleon-nucleon (NN) interactions from chiral effective field theory (χEFT) up to and including next-to-next-to-next-to-leading order (N3LO). These PPDs quantify the spread in nd predictions due to the variability of the low-energy constants (LECs) inferred from NN scattering data. We use the wave-packet continuum discretization method to solve the Alt-Grassberger-Sandhas form of the Faddeev equations for elastic scattering. We draw 100 samples from the PPDs of nd cross sections up to 67 MeV in scattering energy, i.e., in the energy region where the effects of three-nucleon forces are expected to be small. We find that the uncertainty about NN LECs inferred from NN scattering data, when assuming uncorrelated errors, does not translate to significant uncertainty in the low-energy nd continuum. Based on our estimates, the uncertainty of nd predictions are dominated by the χEFT truncation error, at least below N3LO. At this order, the 90% credible interval of the PPD and the truncation error are comparable, although both are very small on an absolute scale

Ab initio symmetry-adapted emulator for studying emergent collectivity and clustering in nuclei

We discuss emulators from the ab initio symmetry-adapted no-core shell-model framework for studying the formation of alpha clustering and collective properties without effective charges. We present a new type of an emulator, one that utilizes the eigenvector continuation technique but is based on the use of symplectic symmetry considerations. This is achieved by using physically relevant degrees of freedom, namely, the symmetry-adapted basis, which exploits the almost perfect symplectic symmetry in nuclei. Specifically, we study excitation energies, point-proton root-mean-square radii, along with electric quadrupole moments and transitions for 6Li and 12C. We show that the set of parameterizations of the chiral potential used to train the emulators has no significant effect on predictions of dominant nuclear features, such as shape and the associated symplectic symmetry, along with cluster formation, but slightly varies details that affect collective quadrupole moments, asymptotic normalization coefficients, and alpha partial widths up to a factor of two. This makes these types of emulators important for further constraining the nuclear force for high-precision nuclear structure and reaction observables

Predicting project performance using pre-construction performance indicators - A case study evaluation

Predicting the outcome of a construction project largely relies on estimated targets of time and cost. Still, hitting the targets does not mean that the project is a success on all performance levels. Here, a retrospective case study was undertaken on a construction project identified as a successful project by the partners involved. The purpose of the study was to validate conceptual design indicators of a high-performance construction project as reported in the literature, by answering the following research questions: "What characterizes the dialogue between the different disciplines; (2) What is the dialogue about; and (3) When in the process do questions arise?" Findings indicate that the interprofessional dialogue within the project team was well established. The paper introduces a discussion that the dialogue benefited from the collaborative project environment as well as the early design intent. Further, the study also suggests that the interprofessional dialogue supported a sound project team development