Semiclassical limit for mixed states with singular and rough potentials

International audienceWe consider the semiclassical limit for the Heisenberg-von Neumann equation with a potential which consists of the sum of a repulsive Coulomb potential, plus a Lipschitz potential whose gradient belongs to $BV$; this assumption on the potential guarantees the well posedness of the Liouville equation in the space of bounded integrable solutions. We find sufficient conditions on the initial data to ensure that the quantum dynamics converges to the classical one. More precisely, we consider the Husimi functions of the solution of the Heisenberg-von Neumann equation, and under suitable assumptions on the initial data we prove that they converge, as \e \to 0, to the unique bounded solution of the Liouville equation (locally uniformly in time)

Nonlinear waves in adhesive strings

We study a 1D semilinear wave equation modeling the dynamic of an elastic string interacting with a rigid substrate through an adhesive layer. The constitutive law of the adhesive material is assumed elastic up to a finite critical state, beyond such a value the stress discontinuously drops to zero. Therefore the semilinear equation is characterized by a source term presenting jump discontinuity. Well-posedness of the initial boundary value problem of Neumann type, as well as qualitative properties of the solutions are studied and the evolution of different initial conditions are numerically investigated

Third-Order Phase Transition:Random Matrices and Screened Coulomb Gas with Hard Walls

Consider the free energy of a $d$-dimensional gas in canonical equilibrium under pairwise repulsive interaction and global confinement, in presence of a volume constraint. When the volume of the gas is forced away from its typical value, the system undergoes a phase transition of the third order separating two phases (pulled and pushed). We prove this result i) for the eigenvalues of one-cut, off-critical random matrices (log-gas in dimension $d=1$) with hard walls; ii) in arbitrary dimension $d\geq1$ for a gas with Yukawa interaction (aka screened Coulomb gas) in a generic confining potential. The latter class includes systems with Coulomb (long range) and delta (zero range) repulsion as limiting cases. In both cases, we obtain an exact formula for the free energy of the constrained gas which explicitly exhibits a jump in the third derivative, and we identify the 'electrostatic pressure' as the order parameter of the transition. Part of these results were announced in [F. D. Cunden, P. Facchi, M. Ligab\`o and P. Vivo, J. Phys. A: Math. Theor. 51, 35LT01 (2018)].Comment: 39 pages, 5 figure

Taming the rotating wave approximation

The interaction between light and matter is one of the oldest research areas of quantum mechanics, and a field that just keeps on delivering new insights and applications. With the arrival of cavity and circuit quantum electrodynamics we can now achieve strong light-matter couplings which form the basis of most implementations of quantum technology. But quantum information processing also has high demands requiring total error rates of fractions of percentage in order to be scalable (fault-tolerant) to useful applications. Since errors can also arise from modelling, this has brought into center stage one of the key approximations of quantum theory, the Rotating Wave Approximation (RWA) of the quantum Rabi model, leading to the Jaynes-Cummings Hamiltonian. While the RWA is often very good and incredibly useful to understand light-matter interactions, there is also growing experimental evidence of regimes where it is a bad approximation. Here, we ask and answer a harder question: for which experimental parameters is the RWA, although perhaps qualitatively adequate, already not good enough to match the demands of scalable quantum technology? For example, when is the error at least, and when at most, 1%? To answer this, we develop rigorous non-perturbative bounds taming the RWA. We find that these bounds not only depend, as expected, on the ratio of the coupling strength and the oscillator frequency, but also on the average number of photons in the initial state. This confirms recent experiments on photon-dressed Bloch-Siegert shifts. We argue that with experiments reporting controllable cavity states with hundreds of photons and with quantum error correcting codes exploring more and more of Fock space, this state-dependency of the RWA is increasingly relevant for the field of quantum computation, and our results pave the way towards a better understanding of those experiments

Torus as phase space: Weyl quantization, dequantization, and Wigner formalism

The Weyl quantization of classical observables on the torus (as phase space) without regularity assumptions is explicitly computed. The equivalence class of symbols yielding the same Weyl operator is characterized. The Heisenberg equation for the dynamics of general quantum observables is written through the Moyal brackets on the torus and the support of theWigner transform is characterized. Finally, a dequantization procedure is introduced that applies, for instance, to the Pauli matrices. As a result we obtain the corresponding classical symbols. Published by AIP Publishing

Stability of the gapless pure point spectrum of self-adjoint operators

We consider a self-adjoint operator T on a separable Hilbert space, with pure-point and simple spectrum with accumulations at finite points. Explicit conditions are stated on the eigenvalues of T and on the bounded perturbation V ensuring the global stability of the spectral nature of T + epsilon V, epsilon is an element of R

The semiclassical limit of a quantum Zeno dynamics

Motivated by a quantum Zeno dynamics in a cavity quantum electrodynamics setting, we study the asymptotics of a family of symbols corresponding to a truncated momentum operator, in the semiclassical limit of vanishing Planck constant h -> 0 and large quantum number N -> infinity, with hN kept fixed. In a suitable topology, the limit is the discontinuous symbol p chi(D) (x, p) where chi(D) is the characteristic function of the classically permitted region D in phase space. A refined analysis shows that the symbol is asymptotically close to the function p chi((N))(D) (x, p), where chi((N))(D) is a smooth version of chi(D) related to the integrated Airy function. We also discuss the limit from a dynamical point of view

Random matrices associated to Young diagrams

We consider the singular values of certain Young diagram shaped random matrices. For block-shaped random matrices, the empirical distribution of the squares of the singular eigenvalues converges almost surely to a distribution whose moments are a generalization of the Catalan numbers. The limiting distribution is the density of a product of rescaled independent Beta random variables and its Stieltjes-Cauchy transform has a hypergeometric representation. In special cases we recover the Marchenko-Pastur and Dykema-Haagerup measures of square and triangular random matrices, respectively. We find a further factorization of the moments in terms of two complex-valued random variables that generalizes the factorization of the Marchenko-Pastur law as product of independent uniform and arcsine random variables