45 research outputs found
Enhanced quantum entanglement in the non-Markovian dynamics of biomolecular excitons
We show that quantum coherence of biomolecular excitons is maintained over
exceedingly long times due to the constructive role of their non-Markovian
protein-solvent environment. Using a numerically exact approach, we demonstrate
that a slow quantum bath helps to sustain quantum entanglement of two pairs of
Forster coupled excitons, in contrast to a Markovian environment. We consider
the crossover from a fast to a slow bath and from weak to strong dissipation
and show that a slow bath can generate robust entanglement. This persists to
surprisingly high temperatures, even higher than the excitonic gap and is
absent for a Markovian bath.Comment: online-published version, minor modification
A CD36 ectodomain mediates insect pheromone detection via a putative tunnelling mechanism.
CD36 transmembrane proteins have diverse roles in lipid uptake, cell adhesion and pathogen sensing. Despite numerous in vitro studies, how they act in native cellular contexts is poorly understood. A Drosophila CD36 homologue, sensory neuron membrane protein 1 (SNMP1), was previously shown to facilitate detection of lipid-derived pheromones by their cognate receptors in olfactory cilia. Here we investigate how SNMP1 functions in vivo. Structure-activity dissection demonstrates that SNMP1's ectodomain is essential, but intracellular and transmembrane domains dispensable, for cilia localization and pheromone-evoked responses. SNMP1 can be substituted by mammalian CD36, whose ectodomain can interact with insect pheromones. Homology modelling, using the mammalian LIMP-2 structure as template, reveals a putative tunnel in the SNMP1 ectodomain that is sufficiently large to accommodate pheromone molecules. Amino-acid substitutions predicted to block this tunnel diminish pheromone sensitivity. We propose a model in which SNMP1 funnels hydrophobic pheromones from the extracellular fluid to integral membrane receptors
Quantum Entanglement of Excitons in Coupled Quantum Dots
Optically-controlled exciton dynamics in coupled quantum dots is studied. We
show that the maximally entangled Bell states and Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger
(GHZ) states can be robustly generated by manipulating the system parameters to
be at the avoided crossings in the eigenenergy spectrum. The analysis of
population transfer is systematically carried out using a dressed-state
picture. In addition to the quantum dot configuration that have been discussed
by Quiroga and Johnson [Phys. Rev. Lett. \QTR{bf}{83}, 2270 (1999)], we show
that the GHZ states also may be produced in a ray of three quantum dots with a
shorter generation time.Comment: 16 pages, 7 figures, to appear in Phys. Rev.
Role of many-body entanglement in decoherence processes
A pure state decoheres into a mixed state as it entangles with an
environment. When an entangled two-mode system is embedded in a thermal
environment, however, each mode may not be entangled with its environment by
their simple linear interaction. We consider an exactly solvable model to study
the dynamics of a total system, which is composed of an entangled two-mode
system and a thermal environment, and also an array of infinite beam splitters.
It is shown that many-body entanglement of the system and the environment plays
a crucial role in the process of disentangling the system.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figur
Creating Bell states and decoherence effects in quantum dots system
We show how to improve the efficiency for preparing Bell states in coupled
two quantum dots system. A measurement to the state of driven quantum laser
field leads to wave function collapse. This results in highly efficiency
preparation of Bell states. The effect of decoherence on the efficiency of
generating Bell states is also discussed in this paper. The results show that
the decoherence does not affect the relative weight of and in the
output state, but the efficiency of finding Bell states.Comment: 4 pages, 2figures, corrected some typo
Size-dependent decoherence of excitonic states in semiconductor microcrystallites
The size-dependent decoherence of the exciton states resulting from the
spontaneous emission is investigated in a semiconductor spherical
microcrystallite under condition . In general, the
larger size of the microcrystallite corresponds to the shorter coherence time.
If the initial state is a superposition of two different excitonic coherent
states, the coherence time depends on both the overlap of two excitonic
coherent states and the size of the microcrystallite. When the system with
fixed size is initially in the even or odd coherent states, the larger average
number of the excitons corresponds to the faster decoherence. When the average
number of the excitons is given, the bigger size of the microcrystallite
corresponds to the faster decoherence. The decoherence of the exciton states
for the materials GaAs and CdS is numerically studied by our theoretical
analysis.Comment: 4 pages, two figure
Dynamics of entanglement for coherent excitonic states in a system of two coupled quantum dots and cavity QED
The dynamics of the entanglement for coherent excitonic states in the system
of two coupled large semiconductor quantum dots () mediated by a
single-mode cavity field is investigated. Maximally entangled coherent
excitonic states can be generated by cavity field initially prepared in odd
coherent state. The entanglement of the excitonic coherent states between two
dots reaches maximum when no photon is detected in the cavity. The effects of
the zero-temperature environment on the entanglement of excitonic coherent
state are also studied using the concurrence for two subsystems of the excitonsComment: 7 pages, 6 figure
Entanglement Dynamics in Two-Qubit Open System Interacting with a Squeezed Thermal Bath via Quantum Nondemolition interaction
We analyze the dynamics of entanglement in a two-qubit system interacting
with an initially squeezed thermal environment via a quantum nondemolition
system-reservoir interaction, with the system and reservoir assumed to be
initially separable. We compare and contrast the decoherence of the two-qubit
system in the case where the qubits are mutually close-by (`collective regime')
or distant (`localized regime') with respect to the spatial variation of the
environment. Sudden death of entanglement (as quantified by concurrence) is
shown to occur in the localized case rather than in the collective case, where
entanglement tends to `ring down'. A consequence of the QND character of the
interaction is that the time-evolved fidelity of a Bell state never falls below
, a fact that is useful for quantum communication applications like
a quantum repeater. Using a novel quantification of mixed state entanglement,
we show that there are noise regimes where even though entanglement vanishes,
the state is still available for applications like NMR quantum computation,
because of the presence of a pseudo-pure component.Comment: 17 pages, 9 figures, REVTeX
Multipartite entangled states in coupled quantum dots and cavity-QED
We investigate the generation of multipartite entangled state in a system of
N quantum dots embedded in a microcavity and examine the emergence of genuine
multipartite entanglement by three different characterizations of entanglement.
At certain times of dynamical evolution one can generate multipartite entangled
coherent exciton states or multiqubit states by initially preparing the
cavity field in a superposition of coherent states or the Fock state with one
photon, respectively. Finally we study environmental effects on multipartite
entanglement generation and find that the decay rate for the entanglement is
proportional to the number of excitons.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures, to appear in Phys. Rev.
Generation of maximum spin entanglement induced by cavity field in quantum-dot systems
Equivalent-neighbor interactions of the conduction-band electron spins of
quantum dots in the model of Imamoglu et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 83, 4204 (1999)]
are analyzed. Analytical solution and its Schmidt decomposition are found and
applied to evaluate how much the initially excited dots can be entangled to the
remaining dots if all of them are initially disentangled. It is demonstrated
that the perfect maximally entangled states (MES) can only be generated in the
systems of up to 6 dots with a single dot initially excited. It is also shown
that highly entangled states, approximating the MES with a good accuracy, can
still be generated in systems of odd number of dots with almost half of them
being excited. A sudden decrease of entanglement is observed by increasing the
total number of dots in a system with a fixed number of excitations.Comment: 6 pages, 7 figures, to appear in Phys. Rev.