Atom laser dynamics in a tight-waveguide

We study the transient dynamics that arise during the formation of an atom laser beam in a tight waveguide. During the time evolution the density profile develops a series of wiggles which are related to the diffraction in time phenomenon. The apodization of matter waves, which relies on the use of smooth aperture functions, allows to suppress such oscillations in a time interval, after which there is a revival of the diffraction in time. The revival time scale is directly related to the inverse of the harmonic trap frequency for the atom reservoir.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures, to be published in the Proceedings of the 395th WE-Heraeus Seminar on "Time Dependent Phenomena in Quantum Mechanics ", organized by T. Kramer and M. Kleber (Blaubeuren, Germany, September 2007

Scaling-up quantum heat engines efficiently via shortcuts to adiabaticity

The finite-time operation of a quantum heat engine that uses a single particle as a working medium generally increases the output power at the expense of inducing friction that lowers the cycle efficiency. We propose to scale up a quantum heat engine utilizing a many-particle working medium in combination with the use of shortcuts to adiabaticity to boost the nonadiabatic performance by eliminating quantum friction and reducing the cycle time. To this end, we first analyze the finite-time thermodynamics of a quantum Otto cycle implemented with a quantum fluid confined in a time-dependent harmonic trap. We show that nonadiabatic effects can be controlled and tailored to match the adiabatic performance using a variety of shortcuts to adiabaticity. As a result, the nonadiabatic dynamics of the scaled-up many-particle quantum heat engine exhibits no friction and the cycle can be run at maximum efficiency with a tunable output power. We demonstrate our results with a working medium consisting of particles with inverse-square pairwise interactions, that includes noninteracting and hard-core bosons as limiting cases.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figures; typo in Eq. (51) fixed. Feature paper in the Special Issue "Quantum Thermodynamics" edited by Prof. Dr. Ronnie Koslof

Is the cosmological dark sector better modeled by a generalized Chaplygin gas or by a scalar field?

Both scalar fields and (generalized) Chaplygin gases have been widely used separately to characterize the dark sector of the Universe. Here we investigate the cosmological background dynamics for a mixture of both these components and quantify the fractional abundances that are admitted by observational data from supernovae of type Ia and from the evolution of the Hubble rate. Moreover, we study how the growth rate of (baryonic) matter perturbations is affected by the dark-sector perturbations.Comment: 20 pages, 9 figures, substantially revised, section on matter perturbations added, accepted for publication in EPJ

Cosmology with Ricci-type dark energy

We consider the dynamics of a cosmological substratum of pressureless matter and holographic dark energy with a cutoff length proportional to the Ricci scale. Stability requirements for the matter perturbations are shown to single out a model with a fixed relation between the present matter fraction $\Omega_{m0}$ and the present value $\omega_{0}$ of the equation-of-state parameter of the dark energy. This model has the same number of free parameters as the $\Lambda$CDM model but it has no $\Lambda$CDM limit. We discuss the consistency between background observations and the mentioned stability-guaranteeing parameter combination.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, submitted to the Proceedings of the CosmoSurII conference, Valpara\'iso, Chile, 27 - 31 May 201

Disclosing hidden information in the quantum Zeno effect: Pulsed measurement of the quantum time of arrival

Repeated measurements of a quantum particle to check its presence in a region of space was proposed long ago [G. R. Allcock, Ann. Phys. {\bf 53}, 286 (1969)] as a natural way to determine the distribution of times of arrival at the orthogonal subspace, but the method was discarded because of the quantum Zeno effect: in the limit of very frequent measurements the wave function is reflected and remains in the original subspace. We show that by normalizing the small bits of arriving (removed) norm, an ideal time distribution emerges in correspondence with a classical local-kinetic-energy distribution.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, minor change