Comment on "Quantum Phase Slips and Transport in Ultrathin Superconducting Wires"

In a recent Letter (Phys. Rev. Lett.78, 1552 (1997) ), Zaikin, Golubev, van Otterlo, and Zimanyi criticized the phenomenological time-dependent Ginzburg-Laudau model which I used to study the quantum phase-slippage rate for superconducting wires. They claimed that they developed a "microscopic" model, made qualitative improvement on my overestimate of the tunnelling barrier due to electromagnetic field. In this comment, I want to point out that, i), ZGVZ's result on EM barrier is expected in my paper; ii), their work is also phenomenological; iii), their renormalization scheme is fundamentally flawed; iv), they underestimated the barrier for ultrathin wires; v), their comparison with experiments is incorrect.Comment: Substantial changes made. Zaikin et al's main result was expected from my work. They underestimated tunneling barrier for ultrathin wires by one order of magnitude in the exponen

Efficient Quantum Computation with Probabilistic Quantum Gates

With a combination of the quantum repeater and the cluster state approaches, we show that efficient quantum computation can be constructed even if all the entangling quantum gates only succeed with an arbitrarily small probability p. The required computational overhead scales efficiently both with 1/p and n, where n is the number of qubits in the computation. This approach provides an efficient way to combat noise in a class of quantum computation implementation schemes, where the dominant noise leads to probabilistic signaled errors with an error probability 1-p far beyond any threshold requirement

Trapped ion quantum computation with transverse phonon modes

We propose a scheme to implement quantum gates on any pair of trapped ions immersed in a large linear crystal, using interaction mediated by the transverse phonon modes. Compared with the conventional approaches based on the longitudinal phonon modes, this scheme is much less sensitive to ion heating and thermal motion outside of the Lamb-Dicke limit thanks to the stronger confinement in the transverse direction. The cost for such a gain is only a moderate increase of the laser power to achieve the same gate speed. We also show how to realize arbitrary-speed quantum gates with transverse phonon modes based on simple shaping of the laser pulses.Comment: 5 page

Efficient engineering of multi-atom entanglement through single-photon detections

We propose an efficient scheme to engineer multi-atom entanglement by detecting cavity decay through single-photon detectors. In the special case of two atoms, this scheme is much more efficient than previous probabilistic schemes, and insensitive to randomness in the atom's position. More generally, the scheme can be used to prepare arbitrary superpositions of multi-atom Dicke states without the requirements of high-efficiency detection and separate addressing of different atoms.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figure

Arbitrary-speed quantum gates within large ion crystals through minimum control of laser beams

We propose a scheme to implement arbitrary-speed quantum entangling gates on two trapped ions immersed in a large linear crystal of ions, with minimal control of laser beams. For gate speeds slower than the oscillation frequencies in the trap, a single appropriately-detuned laser pulse is sufficient for high-fidelity gates. For gate speeds comparable to or faster than the local ion oscillation frequency, we discover a five-pulse protocol that exploits only the local phonon modes. This points to a method for efficiently scaling the ion trap quantum computer without shuttling ions.Comment: 4 page

Superfluidity of fermions with repulsive on-site interaction in an anisotropic optical lattice near a Feshbach resonance

We present a numerical study on ground state properties of a one-dimensional (1D) general Hubbard model (GHM) with particle-assisted tunnelling rates and repulsive on-site interaction (positive-U), which describes fermionic atoms in an anisotropic optical lattice near a wide Feshbach resonance. For our calculation, we utilize the time evolving block decimation (TEBD) algorithm, which is an extension of the density matrix renormalization group and provides a well-controlled method for 1D systems. We show that the positive-U GHM, when hole-doped from half-filling, exhibits a phase with coexistence of quasi-long-range superfluid and charge-density-wave orders. This feature is different from the property of the conventional Hubbard model with positive-U, indicating the particle-assisted tunnelling mechanism in GHM brings in qualitatively new physics.Comment: updated with published version

Three-dimensional theory for interaction between atomic ensembles and free-space light

Atomic ensembles have shown to be a promising candidate for implementations of quantum information processing by many recently-discovered schemes. All these schemes are based on the interaction between optical beams and atomic ensembles. For description of these interactions, one assumed either a cavity-QED model or a one-dimensional light propagation model, which is still inadequate for a full prediction and understanding of most of the current experimental efforts which are actually taken in the three-dimensional free space. Here, we propose a perturbative theory to describe the three-dimensional effects in interaction between atomic ensembles and free-space light with a level configuration important for several applications. The calculations reveal some significant effects which are not known before from the other approaches, such as the inherent mode-mismatching noise and the optimal mode-matching conditions. The three-dimensional theory confirms the collective enhancement of the signal-to-noise ratio which is believed to be one of the main advantage of the ensemble-based quantum information processing schemes, however, it also shows that this enhancement need to be understood in a more subtle way with an appropriate mode matching method.Comment: 16 pages, 9 figure